


Santa Monica Dream

by Ampenah



Category: League of Legends
Genre: High School, League of Legends - Freeform, School, high, league - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23541028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ampenah/pseuds/Ampenah
Summary: Kennen is in his first year of high school, with Shen as a foster parent and Akali as a sort-of sister. School's already hard enough, but then a new kid shows up who seems determined to tank their duo physics project in his first week, Akali disappears after an argument with Shen, and everything in his life seems to pick Right Now to go topsy turvy. With his dad losing sleep trying to find a grown adult that doesn't want to be found, half of his friends not talking to each other because of an argument, a new classmate who seems determined to bring Kennen's already struggling grades down, and a new rising pop band with some suspiciously familiar faces, what's a little yordle to do?
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't expect frequent updates, I have a bad habit of starting something and forgetting about it. That said, I won't delete this, and in the very probable event that I do forget about it, I'll come back eventually, go 'oh yeah' and try to bust out another chapter, in true Amp fashion.

If Kennen had to pick a word to describe Shen, he thinks, he would use ' _impassive_ '. His word for Akali would be ' _untamed_ '. His own, as he's been told and described as, would be ' _hyper_ '. 

Kennen's phone buzzes in his pocket and he checks it under his desk. It's from Akali.

  
_**wat u want 4 dinner** _

  
_im dying for fish is that okay_

  
**_ya u ok w/ eel?_ **

  
_sure sounds good_

  
He sends Shen a text just as the bell rings to signal the end of class.

  
_akalis making eel for dinner_

  
He stands and slips his phone into his pocket, grabbing his literature textbook and homework with one hand and his backpack with the other. He stuffs them into the bag as he rushes to the door, making it into the hallway a few seconds before the rush hits. He follows traffic until he gets to the last science classroom in the hall, and waits at the door.

  
Lulu and Gnar are the last two to exit; the teacher is already rewriting stuff on the whiteboard, and a few other kids are already brushing past to take their seats. 

  
Gnar waves and chatters with Lulu, who looks like she's having a dreamy day. 

  
They walk together to the classroom at the other end of the school that they call 'study hall', but the rest of the school calls 'special ed', because they're assholes. Kennen tells a joke as they walk, Gnar laughs, they pass a few more doors before Lulu registers what Kennen said, and laughs too. 

  
They walk into the classroom to the sound of a small explosion and Ms Crownguard, the 'teacher', sighing into her hands. Lulu says, 'Hi, Ms Lux', Gnar says something that's probably an approximation of that, and Kennen waves as he digs the fire blanket out of the cupboard next to the door and tosses it over Rumble's desk, who's frantically patting out the fire on his sleeve. 

  
Once Rumble's device has stopped smoking and they've put away the blanket, Lux passes out coloring sheets and two boxes of colored pencils. She doesn't give one to Rumble, who's fiddling with the thing that exploded, muttering under his breath; she hands Lulu and Kennen each one of the boxes of colored pencils with her sheet, and she goes back to her desk for the box of giant crayons they use in kindergarten classes for Gnar. She sits at the desks, arranged in a circle months ago, with the group, and colors with them, laughing at jokes, asking about the game Gnar has open on his phone (he bounces between the game and the coloring, while Kennen himself jumps between four or five of them, his page only half done). Gnar writes his response in crayon on the back of his sheet, and holds up his sentences for the group to read as his words get more and more jumbled. Rumble cracks a joke about pokemon and goes back to fiddling, but he's listening to the group today, so that's good.

  
Lulu hums quietly while coloring, and only looks up to let her gaze wander around the room and at the tree outside the window. 

  
Gnar plays his pokemon battle game. 

  
Rumble watches Gnar over his shoulder while he unscrews part of the metal in his hands.

  
Lux tries to engage Lulu, and talks with the boys. 

  
Kennen texts Akali, wonders if Shen saw his message, and tries to explain why he has a giant bruise on his arm because he and Akali were playing swords with the pans at home. He texts Rumble, and gets him to laugh when he stops fiddling long enough to read.

  
_hey can u see if ur uncle can explode shens back yard_

  
**_didnt shen get like_ **

  
**_super mad last time_ **

  
_lmao yeah im not allowed to weed anymore but akali promised me kbbq if i did it again for her turn_

  
_she thought it was great_

  
_tbh it was, most emotion ive ever seen out of shen_

  
**_LOL sure ill msg him and lyk_ **

  
The bell rings, and the group packs up and heads their separate ways for their next classes, calling goodbye to Lux. Kennen and Gnar have a math class together this period, and walk Lulu to her literature class. She has enough sense to respond to their goodbyes, at least. 

  
Gnar waves at Kennen from his lucky spot in the back of the room, Kennen with his unlucky spot at the front where the teacher can see if he's on his phone from the board. Kennen doesn't check the device when it buzzes in his pocket several times.

  
The bell rings and Kennen waits for Gnar at the door. The other yordle is chattering at one of the vastaya in their year, who nods as he gathers the gist of what Gnar is talking about.

That's the only reason Gnar is in the higher functioning 'special ed' class. His grades are fine, he understands the teachers, and he interacts with other students, and he can read and write; but there are plenty of kids that can read and write and do their numbers, but are still kept completely separate because they can't talk. Gnar can get his point across, eventually, and can just write it if all else fails. It takes some time to get used to understanding him, but it's not impossible. 

  
Kennen isn't entirely sure what's wrong with Lulu, but if he has to explain it to someone else, she's basically Alice in Wonderland. The whimsy animated one from the 80s, not the Tim Burton ones. She's eternally, like, 6, too, unless you piss her off, but that's not that different from any other yordle. She gets her work done, she scores alright on tests considering she doesn't pay attention even when she's mentally present, and she can probably talk the best out of the four yordles in the study hall class.

  
Rumble can talk, he just doesn't care. He's got really good test scores and does his homework, but all his teachers have given up trying to get him to pay attention in class. He's a high-functioning autistic who got diagnosed at age 3 and his barely-home uncle, Ziggs, his guardian, said 'nope I am not putting you in the special needs system' and promptly enrolled Rumble, who already knew half his alphabet, in preschool, and called the symptoms of autism 'quirks' and just took everything in stride, allbeit in not quite the most supportive manner. If Kennen were to spend much time with Ziggs, he'd say there was some high-functioning disorder in the man as well, so the concept that the guy just kind of went 'The kid exists. he can pick up his toys and point at the food he wants, that's all I care about. Every kid has meltdowns and loud noises scare every creature, some are just more sensitive, I don't know what you mean when you tell me there's something wrong with my nephew piss off.'

  
The teachers and school counselor urged Ziggs to put Rumble into a special needs group when Rumble spent the entirety of elementary and middle school alone, despite his attempts to make friends. Other kids had had the chance to grow their social skills where he had been stunted, and not because of anybody hurting his chances. He just hadn't developed fully in that area. Ziggs asked Rumble what he wanted, and Rumble just shrugged and said 'the teachers know what they're talking about, probably.', and there were some tests thrown his way, and Rumble finally had a few friends.

  
Kennen himself was also a high-functioning autistic and adhd, something Shen was still scrambling to keep up with. Kennen had boundless energy, couldn't focus in class, would make it through about half of his homework before he started to go insane trying to sit still, and God forbid he tried to explain his thought processes to people. Akali was able to translate, usually; pick apart Kennen's sentences and figure out the meaning, or finish his sentences for him when he was trying to explain what he wanted. Kennen struggles with talking to people, which his counselor assures him is normal, but he knows it drives Akali insane, because she couldn't take him anywhere when they were younger. He used to get so frustrated about not being able to explain himself properly that he'd start to cry, and Akali's friends were never mean to him, but they weren't really able to take care of him, either, between the age gap and not knowing what to do. They were kids too, at the time.

  
His next class is the last one before lunch- his favorite, gym. They're doing things in stations today, so he joins one of the groups waving him over, and they go to the jump rope section for fifteen minutes. They don't talk to Kennen, but they talk to each other, and he stands off to the side awkwardly as they go, but it's not unpleasant. This group and one other usually wave him over when they have an open spot, and when there's team exercises, they do just fine.

  
There's jump rope, running up and down the stairs on the bleachers, half a court for basketball, and half a court for keeping a badminton shuttle in the air. They don't talk to Kennen the entire time, but someone else comments on how he actually got a basket despite his height, so there's that, at least.

  
Coach Trundle blows his whistle, and everyone sprints to the locker rooms as the sound echoes. Kennen's hands are twitching when he leaves the crowded, noisy locker room, and he takes a deep breath in the hallway as he makes his way to the field behind the front office, where nobody goes. He climbs the tree in front of Headmaster Fiora's window, waves at her, and disappears into the foliage.

He finally scrolls through his texts.

  
From Rumble, he gets:

  
**_yo ziggs says he's down to do it whenever shens out for more than like 4 hours just let us know_ **

  
From Shen, he gets:

  
**_I take it she isn't at school?_ **

  
_no i hvnt cn her_

  
And from Lulu, he gets:

  
**_hey can u help me w homework after school :O_ **

  
_sure ill meet u in the library? :D_

  
She doesn't answer, but he sends Shen and Akali separate texts saying he'll be at school until the library closes at 4:30 anyway.

  
He eats his bento (rice, steak and green bell peppers, a veggie salad, and Shen managed to fit a cookie into one of the corners. Kennen brushes off a few pieces of rice stuck to it, and eats that first), then plays around in the branches until the bell rings. He waves goodbye to Fiora on his way back. 

Kennen slides into a seat towards the back of the room, next to the wall, in his next class. His grades are usually barely above average, because he can't pay attention in class and can't sit still long enough to do his homework correctly and be able to remember it, but the one exception is AP Physics. 

  
Kennen is the youngest member of the class, being a freshman, but Mr. Sol is cool, and the smaller class size helps his brain to focus a little. More importantly, though, Kennen just likes the material. 

  
Before he took introductory Physics in the 8th grade, he looked at the world and assumed everything just worked because people made it so. The car ran because Shen said so. The stove didn't burn the food when Akali cooked, but it did burn Kennen's hand when he put it too close when he was a kid, because Zed told him not to play with the pretty blue fire once when he was babysitting, and Kennen didn't listen, so Zed made it so. His bike worked (until he ran headfirst into their mailbox trying to avoid a loose dog) because Shen made the thing listen to Kennen, and that was why Shen had to hold Kennen steady at first. Birds flew and dogs ran and boats made of metal floated when wooden ones sunk, because people said so. 

  
After that pre-Physics course, he understood that boats floated because of water displacement, fire burned his hand but not the food because there was a pan between the food and the stove to disperse the heat, weight was the pull the planet had on objects, and ice was backwards, and took the heat in, instead of sending the cold out. Birds flew because of lift and drag, cars worked because something in the car moved something else that caused little tiny explosions that moved other parts, and those parts made the tires move, which made the car go. The bike worked because... reasons. Until Kennen ran it into the mailbox and never asked for a new one, it just did.

  
Physics was like an explanation for the world, and the world became simultaneously less and more magical as he learned about it. 

  
It helps that Mr. Sol is really into physics, himself, though he does take low grades on tests as a personal attack. It always helps Kennen to understand a subject better when the teacher is really into it themselves, and pissing Mr. Sol off is _not_ something anybody likes to do, and it's an AP class besides.

  
In his last class, he does everything he can to avoid pissing the teacher off for an entirely different reason: Mr. Singed is _creepy_. Drawing his attention is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, so Kennen does everything in his power to keep his Chemistry grades as close to average as possible, because while it's horrible drawing his ire and being used as a public example of how not to study, it's just as bad to be used as the good example.

  
So he sits and suffers through the most uncomfortable hour of the day, and heads to the library. If Lulu doesn't show up, he can try to get through some of his homework, and if she does, then, well, Nasus knows what corner they haunt, and he knows it's a lost cause.

  
Lulu is a year older than him and Gnar, but really bad at Biology, something Kennen hopes he's decent at, what with Shen being a surgeon and all. So when Gnar shows up alongside Lulu, there are two people to help keep Lulu on track, and the worst of her dreamy phase is over anyway, it seems, so studying and homework goes a little smoother than Kennen expected.

  
An hour and a half later, Nasus kicks them out, and they walk Lulu home before Kennen and Gnar walk another few blocks, chatting about whether either of them will join the fall sports teams, or if they're going to homecoming, or what they're having for dinner. Kennen promises to log onto minecraft if Gnar texts him about it later, and they split off down their separate streets. 

  
When Kennen walks into the house, it smells like burnt soy sauce, and he spots Kayn's book bag on the floor next to the couch. 

  
In the kitchen, both Akali and Kayn are covered in a thick, vaguely soy-colored brown goop, and they're laughing as they wipe it off their faces. When Akali sees Kennen in the adjacent dining room, she waves, prompting Kayn to turn and wave as well. He waves back, and as she's cleaning up what she can on the counters, Akali explains.

  
"Kayn was being a pussy about putting the eel into the soy sauce, so I called him a coward, and then he threw it, and the splash was so big it hit the fan." She points at the overhead fan over the stove. 

Kennen just smiles and helps clean up the mess, listening to them talk.

  
"So I was thinking about joining cross country again this year," Kayn says. 

  
"Yeah? I was thinking about trying out for the volleyball team this year, it's too hot for tennis."

  
" _You're_ too hot for tennis," is Kayn's response. Akali throws a kitchen towel at him.

  
"You gonna finally get over your fear of Darius and try out for the basketball team?", she asks him.

  
"Haha, no. Soccer maybe, though. Might not do anything in winter, though, the cold sucks."

  
"Mm, I was definitely gonna try out for soccer. Anything to rub in your face when the girls' team inevitably kicks ass."

  
"Hah, I'll try for soccer in winter if you go with me to track in spring," Kayn says. 

  
"Why, so I can kick your ass at two sports?"

  
"Nah, I'll bring cute little Kennen with me so you'll feel bad and let us win." Kayn reaches out to ruffle Kennen's hair as the younger male reaches around him for the bag of apples on the counter, stopping when he sees Kennen tense and start to draw back. "Sorry," Kayn mumbles.

  
Kennen shakes his head and takes a bite of the apple, ignoring Shen's voice in the back of his head, admonishing him for not rinsing the thing first. "I'll try out for track if you want," he says. 

  
They both glance at Akali when she says, "Try out for it if you really want to do it, not because Kayn bullies you into it. You're a cute shield and all, but Kayn's an asshole, and I'd run you both in the dirt just to watch you kids whine about it." She opens a banana and breaks it in half, handing Kayn the part still in the peel. Kayn snorts as he peels it the rest of the way and takes a bite.

  
"I am a _year_ younger than you, woman." 

  
"Baby faced and all!", Akali says as she shoves his shoulder lightly. 

  
Kayn looks at Kennen with a smile, then. "No, but for real, I think you'd be good at it. A good place to get your energy out, at least. With how much you used to run laps around Shen when you were younger, you've got the speed." 

  
They eat their fruit in silence after that, the eel in what's left of the soy sauce cooking on low heat.

  
As Kayn throws the peel into the trash can, he glances at the clock on the microwave, and his eyes go wide in fear. 

  
"Shit, I'm late!", he yelps as he sprints to the living room to grab his bag and run out the door, jumping back when the door opens before he can grab the handle. "Hi Shen, bye Shen!" He bolts around the man, muttering "Zed's gonna fucking kill me-" as Shen closes the door behind him. 

  
Shen waves at Kennen and Akali before he disappears up the stairs, and after a few minutes, they can hear the shower turn on. 

  
When he comes back downstairs, Kennen and Akali are at the end of a grand prix, Akali glaring at Kennen as he and Toad cross the finish line just after Akali and Yoshi recover from a perfectly timed blue shell.

" _You_ ," she points at the grinning yordle next to her on the floor in front of the TV, "are way too good at this game, and way too much of a _jerk_." She stands up and hands the controller to Shen as she heads to the kitchen to make sure nothing is burning, the table already set by Kennen. Shen laughs quietly, like always, as he takes a seat on the pristine couch, finishing the prix for Akali, losing spectacularly. 

Just as the race ends, Akali calls them in for dinner, and they set the controllers down to go wash their hands, joining her at the table. 

  
Dinner in their household is usually a quiet affair, between Kennen being socially awkward and Shen usually being exhausted after a long day at the hospital across town. Akali used to try to instigate conversation, but she gave up years ago, and Kennen used to talk nonstop as a kid, but most days, they just eat their dinner in quiet companionship and then go about their own things. As such, when they finish, Shen helps Kennen collect the dishes, and then disappears to his own room, a book from the shelf in the living room in hand. Kennen rinses them and puts them into the dishwasher, setting it to heavy wash before he finally checks his phone, signing onto minecraft and discord, where Gnar is already online. 

  
Lulu joins them at around 9, then leaves an hour later to take a shower and go to bed. At 11, Gnar calls it a night, and Kennen goes to take his own shower, calling a goodnight into Shen's open bedroom door.

Akali calls one out half an hour later, and half an hour after that, Shen opens Kennen's door to make sure he's alright after Kennen knocked the cup of water on his nightstand over. Shen leaves and returns wordlessly with a towel, trading with Kennen for the empty cup and disappearing down the stairs again. 

  
When he comes back with a full cup, Kennen has the mess cleaned up and another towel over the damp spot, putting the wet one in the basket of dirty clothes in the corner. Shen helps Kennen pull the blankets back up, and tucks him in with a light pat on the shoulder. He pauses at the door, his hand hovering over the light switch before he asks, "How was school?"

  
And because Kennen is tired, and he knows Shen is, too, he says, "Lulu had a dreamy day, but the physics teacher was cool. I'm thinking about trying out for track in spring." Shen's lips tip up in a small smile. 

  
"Well, maybe tomorrow, she'll be a little more awake, hm?" When Kennen just shrugs, he says, "Goodnight, Kennen."

  
"'Night, dad." 

  
Shen shuts off the light and closes the door softly, knocking twice on Akali's door and calling in, "You alright in there?"

  
"Yeah, just having mad sex with a random off the street," she says with a laugh.

  
Shen just snorts and says, slightly admonishingly, "Good _night_ , Akali."

  
"Night, Shen."

  
"You know, one of these years, that's not gonna be a lie, and I'm gonna laugh when you walk in on it," Zed says over the earpiece Shen forgot to mute. "Hey, get your _ass_ back in bed!"

Shen snorts when there's suddenly four high-pitched voices yelling as a door slams open, then laughter when Zed tosses one kid into their bed, the rest probably following soon after. The laughter dies down as the door closes, and Zed sighs.

  
"One of these years, you'll go a night without having to toss kids like balls," Shen answers.

  
"Yeah, right. Just like one of these years, I'll be free of you."

  
Kayn's voice in the background, followed by two girls no older than Kennen giggling from another room, brings another yell of 'Get in _bed_!' from Zed. 

  
"I am genuinely surprised they don't curse as much as you do," Shen says.

  
"You kidding? Half of them were cursing worse than a sailor when they showed up here," is Zed's answer, just as Shen yawns. "Alright, you old butt, I'll let you get your shut eye." Shen laughs a little before he says good night to Zed, too, flopping backward into his bed. 

  
He doesn't quite mean to fall asleep there, only half on his bed and with his door wide open, but his thoughts slow with his breathing.

  
He wakes only two hours later to a call from the hospital, a car crash victim in the emergency room needing an immediate operation. 

  
At least he got to say goodnight this time, he thinks, as he gets ready for another long day of work. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I hope I didn't spell anyone's names wrong here.

Kennen knows he failed his literature test, with how many questions he had to skip. Lux looked a little put off when he handed it to her, but she just pursed her lips and handed him his history test.

He knows he'll fail that one, too. It's the only home study course he has, and with Akali also still in school, and with Shen's work schedule being as unpredictable as it is, it's really just down to him to teach himself the material, and he just doesn't have the discipline to make himself sit there for an hour every night reading the text book and hoping he remembers it all long enough to take the test on it every month.

He's more confident about the Physics test, and the Chem one, and he and Gnar have a long standing bet on whoever gets a better score in whatever classes they share (6th grade was expensive, when they shared four classes together, and Kennen distinctly remembers having almost no money from his allowance from Shen for more than half the year), so of course he studied that one to high hell. Algebra comes easy to him, but it does to Gnar, too, so he has to actually _try_.

They don't take tests in class like the rest of the school, they spend most of the day in their 'study hall' room doing one test at a time before Ms. Lux makes them take a break for half an hour, walk around, do something else, then get back to it. 

In other words, he's not allowed to touch his history test until the others finish their first test too, so he flips the stapled papers over and puts his head on his arms over the desk, bored.

He only has to wait ten minutes before everyone else has finished, so he stands up when Rumble finally turns his test in, grabs his phone, and plops down on the open windowsill, pulling open any of his history notes.

He's fidgeting because he's bored, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and kicking his heel against the wall lightly, until Lulu hauls herself up onto the wall and lays her head on his leg, a paper of her own notes in hand. It's a wide-awake day for her. Rumble comes over and sits in the chair they use to climb up there, his pointy hair barely brushing against Lulu's arm. Gnar pulls another chair over next to Rumble's, poking all the red stripes in Lulu's leggings until she giggles, stretching her arm until she can scratch behind one of his ears with her fingertips. 

After fifteen minutes, the bell rings, and they all ignore it in favor of phone games, tinkering, or studying. 

"Ms. Lux?", Lulu calls, a few minutes after the late bell rings. 

"Hm," comes Luxanna's response, as she looks up from her novel. 

"What are we gonna do for lunch? Do we have to stay here for that?"

Lux looks around her desk for the paper that is supposed to detail the day. She knows she read it this morning, and the night before, and a week before that, but she woke up late and missed her coffee, so she's scatterbrained and going to be headache-addled. 

When she finally finds it, she sighs and says, "Yeah, I'm sorry, guys. Lunch has to be here, but we can take our sweet time getting it. We go twenty minutes before everyone else does, so there's no noise."

Rumble and Kennen glance at each other, slightly upset at the monthly change to their usually schedules, and being cooped up in this room all day. 

"What about Gym?", Kennen asks. Lulu makes a face, but Kennen ignores her. If he isn't allowed to do _something_ to get his energy out, he's going to scream. The only saving grace of these test days will be the lack of homework.

Lux scans her notes for a minute, checks the back of the page, and shrugs. "It doesn't say anything about that, so as long as you finish your test before your gym classes, you can go." Kennen and Gnar sigh in relief, and Lulu groans. Lux looks at her slyly, mischief in her eyes. "I can also give you a late pass if you _happen_ to take a long time on your test."

Lulu fistpumps, barely missing hitting her elbow on the sill.

With that conversation over, they shuffle back to their desks to start their next test.

Halfway through, Lux feels a headache start to form behind her eyes, and sighs as she leans back in the chair and rubs at her temples, missing her coffee.

It's both really nice and really terrible that the school doesn't have Gym slotted for any periods earlier than 3rd. During the summer, by the time 11 AM rolls around, it's _baking_ hot outside, but during the winter, it's at least had some time to warm up. The reason is that Coach Trundle has some other... thing, that he does during the morning hours, Coach Leona is in morning college courses, and Headmaster Fiora isn't stupid, so she didn't make 'Coach' Kled take the first two hours and pretend he was actually _teaching_ the students anything.

To be fair, almost half the school has PE as a home study course, because they're either in sports, or live too close to the school to warrant a bus ride, but close enough to the school to walk back and forth. 

Kennen wondered, when he came here with Akali when she was a freshman, when Shen was getting her registered in classes and helping her decide what she wanted to do at home, why they even had those two teachers for Gym if they weren't available in the mornings.

When he asked Shen about it, the answer was, "It's a charter school. They don't have to follow the same rules that public schools do, they can hire whoever they like best for the job."

'Who they like best', as it turned out, was an extremely religious college student with a love for sports and pushing people to do well in the sports she coached, and a literal _troll_ who ran them like race horses when he could. 

Both of them were preferable to 'Coach' Kled, with his shoulder lizard and absolute insanity. Akali swears he's on drugs of some kind. Zed mentioned once that he and Shen had had him as an actual Gym teacher back when they were in high school themselves, and Kled had apparently only been a little bit better at the time. He had a motorcycle at the time that he called Skaarl, but he also calls his lizard Skaarl, and Kennen has no idea if the motorcycle still exists.

As Kennen packs his day clothes into his locker, he listens to the grumbling from the other kids around him, saying they were pretty sure both Trundle and Leona's usual parking spots were empty this morning. Now that he thinks about it, some of the kids from 3rd period Gym were nursing some pretty nasty marks.

4th period Gym proves to be no kinder, as it is indeed Kled standing next to a bag of rubber dodge balls. There are about a dozen more bags of dodge balls lined up next to that one. 

There's a collective feeling of dread as everyone glances over at Draven, who's already cracking his knuckles. 

Everyone groups around Kled, the few yordles in the class allowed at the front. Kled picks two balls from the bag. For a yordle himself, he certainly makes small look imposing, glaring them all down from his spot of about two feet tall.

"Alright! Team captains are whoever catch the balls when I throw them at your heads. Rules are, headshots allowed, if you catch the ball, the thrower's out. If it hits the walls behind you, or the floor, it ain't a hit. One bag stays with me, and I'll dump the rest out when all of you are on the court. Me and the late fool, who's _somewhere_ , get to throw balls at whoever we please, out or not. If you're out, you sit on the bleachers. If you catch one of the balls me and the fool throw at you, you get back in! If someone on the floor catches the ball, the team captain picks who comes back in." Skaarl sticks her tongue out at them, then scurries to Kled's other shoulder. With that, the yordle tosses both balls into the group of about 60 students. 

Half of them jump for the balls, half of them very deliberately jump away from them, and there's a big jumble of three dozen high schoolers fighting over picking rights and two rubber balls. 

One of the doors open, and the Performing Arts teacher walks in, deftly catching the ball Kled immediately hurls at him as he saunters over. The kids take that cue to withdraw from the fight for the two balls, Draven and Irelia reigning victorious.

The pair of them move to the middle of each half-court, calling out names at an almost lightning speed. By the end of it, all the kids with Noxian bloodlines are on Draven's side, all the Ionian descendants are on the other, and anyone from other nationalities were chosen like a normal team. 

Kennen finds himself comfortably at the back of Irelia's side of the court, as far from Jhin and Kled as he can get himself. Jhin stands with his hands behind his back, a ball held in his long fingers. Kled bounces one ball between both hands for a moment before he tosses it out into the court, and pours all but one of the bags of balls out, as promised.

Kennen immediately realizes his mistake when none of the balls roll his way. 

Jhin clears his throat, and calls out to them, "I've got the whistle. A high tone means a catch, a low tone means you're out." He blows the whistle with each tone once, and Skaarl scrambles back to Kled's other shoulder, farther from Jhin and his loud noise-maker. 

The game starts off quick with so many bodies on the field, and Jhin and Kled are not taking it easy on them with their own throws from the side lines, picking up any balls that roll their way when they run out of ammo from the last bag.

Karma slides up next to Kennen as he's struggling to keep an eye on anything vaguely red flying towards him, tapping him on the elbow with a ball before she hands it to him. He rubs at his elbow with his free hand as he ducks his head in thanks.

They both yelp as Vladimir and Katarina both throw their balls at them, Kennen diving to the side and Karma ducking and stumbling backwards. Quinn, behind her, throws her own ball to knock the thing off its path to Karma's head. 

Kennen throws his ball at Ezreal, at the same time that Kai'sa and Ahri throw theirs at him. Ezreal blocks the first ball, but the next two hit him in the arm and shin, and he tosses his ball to Draven as he holds up one hand, running for the bleachers. The second his butt touches a seat, Jhin turns and nails him in the chest with a ball of his own, knocking him backward into the footwell of the row behind him. Wukong, next to him, breaks out into laughter, his tail flicking behind him erratically. 

As Kennen looks around at all the people still on the court, he tries to take in how they're handling the game.

Draven throws the balls like they're discs, a full body movement that leaves him vulnerable, but he's also standing behind almost everyone on his team, so he's well protected. Talon and Ekko seem to have taken up the roll of darting around the front, right at the half line of the court, collecting balls and passing them back to the people who are better at throwing. Katarina's aim isn't fantastic, but she's behind them and in front of their backline, where they've taken to hiding their good throwers. Orianna uses two hands to throw, which messes up her aim, but she's also really good at catching the balls. Aphelios, Ashe, and Sarah all throw with one hand, hidden in the backline. Quiana and Sivir move around their side of the court a lot, grabbing their own balls and throwing with full-body movements that turn their balls into bullets, if they do it right. Vladimir is hard to pinpoint, as he hides behind Darius, who throws the ball like a rocket for one moment, then he's up next to Ekko grabbing a ball the next, then he's back by Sarah to throw it the next. Darius is constantly taking hits, not used to ducking and dodging people, but every time someone catches a ball and Jhin, with eyes like a hawk, blows the whistle, he's one of the first people Draven calls back in. 

On Kennen's side, Irelia throws with a fluid motion that sends the ball out too fast to see, standing right up front with Kayn; Karma and Rakan have taken to collecting the balls and handing them to the others. Most of who they've got left have great aim and are good at getting out of the way of the projectiles, but there's a long list of them, and Kennen is heavily optimistic about their chances to win this. Syndra and Kai'sa throw balls at lightning speed, and they're the main focus of Karma and Rakan for more ammo. Ahri throws with one hand, and though her aim isn't great, she was constantly catching balls when the game started. Quinn has disturbingly good reflexes, and she's the main reason they have so many players left, as she throws most of her balls to deflect the incoming ones. Sona is _somehow_ still in the game, as she's spent most of her time ducking and dodging, quick on her feet, but with her horrible aim, she's pretty much useless to the team. Tristana throws pretty hard, and while she runs fast, she's not great at dodging. Irelia's had to call her back in three times already, when Syndra and Quinn aren't out at the same time. Xayah and Neeko are doing really well at throwing balls out to make people dodge into some of Syndra's, or forcing them back so they have to be somewhere they don't want to throw from. Poppy is another one that doesn't throw very well, but every now and then, Irelia calls her back in, just because Kled keeps hitting her on the bleachers. Taliyah, Kog'maw, and Wukong, when he's still in, throw balls whenever they get them, and since there's no real shortage of them, that means a constant barrage headed at people's legs, because none of them have any real power in their throws. Zoe throws with two hands, too small to really put power in it, or see anyone in the sea of people in front of her, but she's also a small target, and hiding behind Neeko. Zyra moves around at the back line, right at the edge of the court, kicking balls back into the court before they roll out, but not contributing otherwise, not willing to ruin her nails on the rubber. Kayn floats around right up front, very much a distraction to the people on the other team trying to throw at him, and since he's right at the front, he has perfect shots at whoever he wants when he actually bothers to pick up a ball. 

Irelia looks back Kai'sa, who's holding a ball in one hand and pointing somewhere on the other team, waiting for Kayn to get them an opening. It's Sona who gets it for them, though, as Orianna looses a ball at her that misses and rolls on the ground. Irelia feints a throw in Ashe's direction as Orianna moves to collect a new ball, and as soon as Kai'sa's ball flies past her, Irelia throws so her ball it's only a few feet behind. Ekko ducks the first, but Irelia's ball tags him in the arm, and he hangs his head as he runs over to the bleachers. 

Draven throws four balls rapid fire, then as Talon passes him two more, he finally lands one on Quinn, who knocks Taliyah over trying to dodge. Quiyana hits her while she's down, but Kayn manages to thread the ball between Aphelios and Sivir, almost hitting Katarina as she has to duck and slide on her knees to avoid it. The ball hits Quiyana on the foot as she jumps, trying to avoid it too. She glares at Kayn as she walks to the bleachers, one hand in the air. 

One of Jhin's balls flies in at the same time Rakan reaches for a ball, hitting his hand just as he's scrambling to get out of it's way, and he groans, walking to sit next to Wukong. Syndra throws her ball just as Kennen skids past her, taking Rakan's place in handing out balls. His own aim isn't great, and he's too overwhelmed to see every ball coming his way, but his speed lends itself greatly to keeping out of the way.

Kog'maw is matching Draven's rapid-fire throwing, but his aim isn't nearly as good. It is unpredictable though, two balls whizzing past Vladimir as he moves around.

Kled is actively aiming at Talon now, and Xayah takes advantage, throwing at the same time as Zoe's halfhearted one. Talon skids to an almost-stop, then _flips_ over all three balls at the same time, Aphelios grabbing his arm as he lands and pulling him out of the way of Tristana's ball. Talon stumbles, pushing Aphelios out of the way of another ball and managing to right himself with the movement, running to the back to get his bearings again.

Darius and Draven throw three balls back to back, forcing Poppy away from the ball she was reaching for. Kayn runs past and picks it up himself, and he and Ahri return fire. Neeko has moved to a spot on the floor away from everyone else, and both Ashe and Sarah throw a ball at her, making her scramble backward, right into the ball Orianna threw behind theirs.

Draven makes the mistake of throwing a ball at Ahri, who's left herself empty-handed and in a clear line of sight for him, catching it deftly and throwing it straight at Darius. "Wu!", Irelia calls out when Jhin blows the whistle twice. The monkey stumbles when Ezreal kicks him lightly in the ankle, both laughing as he rejoins the game. 

Draven throws his last ball on the floor, grumbling as he makes his way over to the bench. Vladimir and Darius share a look as he passes to the bleachers, and the albino starts making his way around their half of the court, talking quietly. Everyone starts to take on a more determined look, now that their best thrower is out.

Katarina holds two balls, passing one to Talon as he runs past, and both of them move to the front corners, throwing at Ahri and backpedaling. She knocks one away with the ball in her hands, but the other one went low, and hits her in the foot. She passes her ball to Syndra as she passes, taking the spot next to Neeko. 

Kayn falls back to Irelia as Kennen passes a ball to each of them.

"Is it just me, or do they look a little mad?", Kayn says. 

"Just aim for Aph and Sivir. They're starting to aim for the good throwers," Irelia answers.

Kled throws a ball at Talon again, and Kai'sa takes the chance he gives her, finally tagging him in the side of the leg. He sighs, making his way over to an empty spot two rows up. Aphelios fumbles trying to catch the ball Tristana threw, at the same time Zoe threw one at him. Zoe cheers as the whistle, then yelps when Orianna and Ashe throw a ball at her, teleporting about five feet forward in her panic. 

"What the hell was that!?", Draven yells from the sidelines. Zoe yells in more panic as the entire team throws balls at her, just trying to get her off the field. Everything misses her, but Poppy manages to catch one. Irelia scans the bleachers, calling, "Nami!", when Jhin blows the whistle.

She waves Kennen over as she throws a ball at Sivir, missing by a foot.

"Tell everyone to aim low, they're trying to catch the balls to get Draven and Aph back in.", she says when he's close enough to hear without yelling.

He nods as he looks up to scan them, only Ashe and Sarah holding balls. 

As he makes his way around, he has to duck one ball that Ashe throws and jump out of the way of one of Kled's. Most people just nod as he tells them, but Xayah and Syndra's responses are "But we're kicking their asses. We just have to get them out."

He shrugs and moves on to the rest.

It ends up being Xayah's throw, a minute later, that gets caught by Orianna, bringing Draven back into the game.

Sivir starts taking up balls again, throwing as rapid-fire as she can in conjunction with Draven's own, and they take out Karma and Zyra in the span of two seconds. Jhin blows the whistle twice, and they both make their way to the bleachers. Zyra settles herself in, knowing Irelia won't call her back. 

Nami throws a ball high, and Vladimir catches it, having to dive to do so. He passes it to Draven, who calls out for Aphelios to come back in. The boy glances at Darius for a second before he runs onto the court, a bit surprised. The whole team seems to be taking the game a lot more seriously now that Draven has proved hitable.

Syndra throws two balls as hard as she can at Vladimir, one of them hitting him in the chest so hard he falls back. It takes him a second after Jhin's whistle to get back up. He collapses in the spot next to Darius when he gets there, exhausted.

Kled turns and throws three balls into the bleachers, Talon and Ekko each catching one, running back into the court at Kled's whistle. The last one hits Ezreal in the arm so hard there's a resonating sound of its impact. Ahri actively glowers at Kled, but nobody ever said he and Jhin weren't allowed to play favorites. 

Irelia dodges the barrage of balls sent her way by Draven, Aphelios, and Sarah, and to cover her, Kayn and Wukong throw three of their own balls at Ekko and Katarina. 

Katarina dodges one, but Kog'maw seemed to have smelled weakness, spitting a ball at her head. It hits her in the head, the drool splattering on her face. She makes a face as she wipes it off, walking to the bleachers.

Ekko and Sivir throw a ball each at Kayn, and he dodges to the side of one, stumbling over a ball on the floor. He falls, avoiding the other, cursing as he lands hard on his wrist and shoulder. He has to roll to avoid Jhin's ball, the man eying him.

"What was that, Kayn?", Jhin calls, throwing another ball at him.

"Nothing, sir!" Jhin throws one more ball, just as Kayn is managing to stand up again. Sona dives to take it for him. It hits her in the face, and several people wince as she holds one eye as she finally sits on the side. Kled is only mean enough to throw a ball at her leg, but Quinn grabs it out of the air, sprinting onto the court again, Irelia cheering.

Kennen and Poppy scramble away from the cluster of balls they were reaching for, Draven and Aphelios forcing them away. One of the balls bounce off the floor and hit Poppy in the chin, making her yelp.

Kennen runs back as Draven is getting another ball, scooping two off the floor and running to pass them to Tristana, who immediately throws one at Sivir. She catches it, and Tristana sighs, running to the bleachers. Draven looks up when the whistle blows, following Darius's finger pointed at Quiyana, who's been tapping her foot in agitation, looking at Draven expectantly.

He calls out her name, and she stands, huffing "Finally," as she runs back in.

Kai'sa moves around the court, picking up balls and throwing as hard as she can at Ashe and Aphelios, but Sarah sprints to the other side of the court, next to Orianna, throwing a ball at Kai'sa as she bends to pick up another ball. It hits her in the hip hard, knocking her over. She brushes herself off as she stands and walks to the bleachers, doing a headcount when she gets there.

She sits next to Xayah and Rakan, sighing.

"This was looking great for our team for a bit, but Draven looks like he's going to war now," she says.

Xayah hums. "The teams are even now. If they don't start catching them, we'll lose." 

Ahri, in the row behind them, says, "Jhin's getting a lot more pointed with his throws, though, like he's trying to give them opportunities."

"He's got a fucking cannon for an arm," Rakan says, looking at the Drama teacher, who's training his aim on Ekko. "Only on the fourth throw, though." 

As Jhin looses his ball at Ekko, Quinn and Zoe throw their balls at Orianna, who deflects one with the ball in her hands, and dodges the other with a twirl to the side.

Kennen stands behind Syndra, three balls stacked in his arms and under his chin, one ball tucked under her left elbow and one in each hand. She throws all six of them rapid-fire at Sarah, who sprints to one side and ducks behind Talon, who knocks the two coming at him aside with the ball in his hand. He tosses it to Sarah after, and runs in the other direction. Irelia throws a ball at Draven, one of Jhin's fast balls following. He dodges Irelia's, and Sivir accidentally sidesteps into the path of Jhin's, trying to avoid the ball Kayn threw at her. It hits her in the jaw and she stumbles to the side, hand flying up to hold her cheek as she moves deliberately in the way of the ball heading toward Ashe on her way to the bleachers.

Talon, Orianna, and Ekko all have two balls each in their hands, circling around Aphelios as he rears up to throw as many balls as he can as fast as possible, launching them at anyone he thinks he might be able to hit. 

Kennen drops the one ball he was holding to be able to catch one, ducking out of the way of three more. One hits Kayn in the arm as he moves to dodge the ball Sarah throws at him, and the rest hit Poppy and Kog'maw. Draven and Ashe loose their two balls each at Irelia, one finding her in the hip. Kled's latest sideline ball goes flying while Kennen is scrambling to keep out of the way, even as Jhin blows the whistle for a long moment with one high chirp at the end, and Irelia calls Ahri back in. The ball hits Kennen in the side of the head, making him stumble, and he trips over a ball on the floor and landing hard on his wrist. 

There's a chorus of 'ooh's as he curls up, the wrist he landed on tucked up to his chest and the other hand holding his head where the ball hit him. The game seems to pause as several people are moving off the court, Kayn kneeling next to Kennen.

Kennen's whole body is locked up and he can't move, can't get enough air, can't see or hear. When he feels Kayn lightly touch his forearm, he screams, curling tighter until his forehead touches his knees, the arm that isn't locked between his chest and his legs moving to fold his ear down, painfuly, to his skull in an uncoordinated, fumbling effort to block out some of the noise.

Jhin is the one who runs over, one hand on Kayn's shoulder as the boy scoops Kennen up into his arms. He ushers them into the boys' locker room, where Kayn falls to the side as soon as the door closes behind them, his back hitting the lockers and sliding down so he's got Kennen nestled against his chest, his knees and arms serving as a cradle to keep the thrashing yordle contained. Kennen finally gets his other arm free, and he sightlessly swings at Kayn, struggling to get away. One of his claws catches the other boy in the chin, and Jhin catches that arm, holding it securely. Kayn has the other one pinned too, the small stream of blood dripping down his chin to his neck already drying. 

It takes about ten minutes for Kennen to finally get the screaming in his head to stop and get his breathing under control, all the energy that had him in 'fear' mode draining out, leaving him exhausted. The tears still fall freely, even as Jhin and Kayn release his hands and he slumps against Kayn's chest.

"Kennen," Jhin says quietly. "Can you tell me which locker your things are in? We're going to take you to Ms. Luxanna's class before everyone comes in to change."

Kennen sniffles and mumbles, "Sixty three."

Jhin nods, moving to open it and collect Kennen's clothes and bag. Kayn wraps his arms around Kennen, securing him as he stands up to set Kennen down again on the wooden bench in front of them.

The game outside has finally settled, and when Kled has enlisted the teenagers in collecting the balls and putting them away, he pokes his head in the door, studying the three of them.

"Y'alright, cuz?", he asks, seeming a bit subdued. Kennen nods, his eyes half lidded in both shame and exhaustion. Skaarl takes it upon herself, when Kled, moves in the room and closes the door behind him, to crawl off Kled's shoulder, across the floor, and up the bench, up his back, and settling herself in the fur on the top of his head. He makes a noise in the back of his throat at the feeling of her crawling up his body and sitting on his head, but makes no move to remove her. 

When Jhin sets Kayn and Kennen's things down on the bench a few moments later, he puts his hand out for Skaarl to crawl to, not touching Kennen. He returns Skaarl to Kled, who runs his finger over the top of her head gently as Kennen and Kayn both move to change into their day clothes.

When they move to step out into the hallway through the back door, Kayn stops and opens the zip on his bookbag, pulling out his grey hoodie. He hands it to Kennen, who just stares at it for a moment before Kayn explains.

"Thought it might help you feel a little more comfortable. It'll be less like a sweater on you and more like a blanket with sleeves, though."

Kennen sets his own bag down, Kled and Jhin waving goodbye as they walk back out the door to deal with the increasing racket in the gymnasium as Kennen slips into it. Indeed, the article hangs down past his knees, and he has to bunch the sleeves up just to get his hands past them, but he immediately feels a little bit better, with the pressure of about a pound of cloth over his body. Kayn smiles, picking up his bag and opening the door for Kennen when he picks his own up again.

Kayn walks him across the school, all the way to the door of Ms. Lux's class, even though Kennen knows Kayn will have to walk it all again to get to the cafeteria. They get there just as the bell rings, and Kennen's hands fly up to cover his ears as the noise grates on them. Kayn pauses for a moment, then reaches down toward the hood.

"Don't freak, okay? I'm pulling the hood up, it'll help against the noise a bit." Kennen puts his hands down when the ringing stops, and tries not to flinch when Kayn's hand brushes the fur on his ear.

"I'll wash it...", Kennen mumbles.

"Oh, don't worry about it, kid," Kayn says, waving him off. "Zed has more I can steal. If you do wash it, I can pick it up the next time I'm over, it's fine. Now get in your class, before the noise starts." 

Kennen nods, waves goodbye to Kayn, and disappears into the classroom, where Lulu and Gnar are laughing about something over Gnar's phone as they eat the cafeteria bread rolls.

Lux waves at him, and he waves back as he slides into the desk next to Rumble's, sighing as he puts his head down on his arms, padded greatly by the enormous sleeves. It's almost a pillow, he thinks. 

He's almost nodded off when Rumble taps his desk with his claw to get his attention, having fished Kennen's bagged lunch out of his backpack hanging on the back of his chair.

Kennen jerks his head up, and Rumble grimaces, but says nothing as they both eat their lunch in silence, Lulu and Gnar laughing much more quietly now, sharing a set of headphones.

Akali made his lunch today, because Shen was gone when they got up, so it's rice, left-over eel, and some sweet corn. She tossed a bag of chips in as an after thought as they were running out the door.

Kennen lays the side of his head down, lunch half eaten as he watches Rumble mess around with the latest device, batteries in the pencil holder at the front of the desk.

He falls asleep there, and Lux lets him stay that way for an hour after lunch, then lets him stay late to finish his Physics and Chemistry tests.

  
When he walks home with Gnar, he's subdued, but Gnar just takes it in stride, turning music on on his phone, keeping the volume low but audible as they walk. They don't talk about anything, but as they part, Gnar says, "It's okay if you don't get on minecraft tonight, you seem really tired."

Kennen just shrugs, then realizes it isn't visible through Kayn's huge hoodie, and nods exaggeratedly. Gnar waves and turns to finish his walk home, and Kennen does the same, slowly.

It takes him five minutes longer than usual to get home, and when he gets there, he finds Shen asleep on the couch, a book open on his chest. Kennen puts a bookmark between the open pages, setting it on the end table before he heads up to his room.

He draws the blinds, tosses his bag in the corner next to the closed door, and climbs into his bed, flopping onto the pillow, the hood blocking out any remaining light in the dark room.

  
Shen wakes when Zed calls him, children chattering in the background.

"Hey."

"Yo. Kayn says you should take it easy on Kennen, he had a bit of a rough day. Something something dodgeball, something something Draven's team kicked their asses."

Shen hums, looking on the floor next to the couch for his book. He glances around when he doesn't find it there, craning his head to see over the arm of the couch. He doesn't remember putting it on the table, but it's there, marked and all. He rolls onto his back, watching the stair case.

Shen sighs, then drops his head to the couch pillow he'd been napping on. Zed continues.

"Khada called, said it was Kled's ball that hit him. He doesn't have your number, or he'd have called. Didn't think to go digging through the contact records, I guess."

Shen thinks for a second, slightly confused. "How does he not have my number? We used to be in, like. Six group chats."

"No, I had his number, and I'd add you to the group chats. You called him a pretentious ass when you met, and then when you were dating, you refused to give him your number as a joke."

"... Huh."

At that moment, Akali walks in, drops her bag at the end of the couch and runs upstairs as quietly as she can. When she returns, she looks a bit tired herself.

 _'Kennen?'_ , he mouths when she looks at him. She shakes her head and mimes sleeping. Shen closes his eyes and breathes in through his nose tiredly.

There's the sound of young girls screaming in the background of Zed's end of the call, and the man curses. "Shit, I gotta go. Take it easy on him, and for God's sake, get some more sleep." He hangs up without waiting for an answer. Shen sighs again and rolls off the couch, getting his feet under him in the space of about four inches. 

He was planning on vacuuming, but if Kennen's asleep, he'll just find something else to clean. 

Two hours later, Shen knocks twice, quietly, because Kennen still hasn't come out of his room, on Akali's door. 

"It's open," she calls, and Shen opens it just enough to poke his head around it. There's purple and green fairy lights around the ceiling, a lair of thin purple fabric pinned to the ceiling fan to filter the light, and a decorative blanket of a blue and green dragon covering the window, filtering that light as well. She's got the packets of homework for the next month spread over her bed, as well as the text books, and there's an Ionian pop group playing on a speaker on the bookshelf that acts as her headboard.

"What do you and Kennen like on your pizza's?"

Kennen wakes when someone knocks on his door, laying there for a few seconds before he groans, crawls out of bed and stretches on his way to open the door. 

"Dinner," is all he says before he steps out of the way, moving toward the stairs.

Kennen yawns and rubs at his eye, feeling the bruise under it where the ball hit him that morning. 

When he gets there, Sivir stands in her OnomotoPizza uniform at the door, two boxes in one hand and a receipt that Akali just handed over in the other. She waves after she hands the boxes to Akali, looking a little apologetic.

Akali sets the boxes on the table as Shen is grabbing plates from the cupboard, setting them in the three usual spots.

They all slide into their spots, and Akali hands it out to them.

Kennen gets two slices of pepperoni, Akali gets two slices of mushrooms and anchovies, and Shen gets one of each. They eat in quiet, as they usually do, but as they're packaging the rest of the pizza into bags for lunches and snacks for the rest of the week, Shen finally says something.

"I heard about what happened today." Kennen ducks his head, already feeling terrible. He hadn't had a breakdown since the big annual tests last schoolyear, he thought he was doing great, but if anything, anything at all, goes unexpectedly, he draws all the attention of the entire class, and that was not a small class, and he scratched Kayn's face, and Kayn's always been really into his looks, and then Kayn lent him the hoodie, and Kennen shouldn't _need_ \--

"You didn't do anything wrong, you know that, right?", Shen interrupts his thoughts, halting the spiral so quick it makes Kennen's head spin to backtrack.

"I scratched Kayn's face and made him late to lunch. And cried on him."

"Kayn's a parkour artist, you think worse hasn't happened to his face and clothes?"

"The whole Gym class saw."

"Kennen, you didn't do anything wrong."

Shen sighs softly when Kennen keeps his head down, scuffing his bare feet on the floor softly. He gently takes the bag of pizza slices out of Kennen's hand, setting it on the counter as he kneels down to Kennen's height.

"Look at me. You didn't do anything wrong. You got overwhelmed and scared. You didn't do anything wrong."

Kennen keeps his eyes on the floor next to Shen's feet, his hands tangled in the sleeves and front pocket of the hoodie.

"Kennen, you didn't do anything wrong. You're not going to be in any trouble for what happened today. You're alright." Shen lets out a breath through his nose when Kennen still doesn't respond, so instead, he says, "Why don't you go on up and play for a bit? Try and get your mind off of it." At that, Kennen nods slightly, moving slowly toward the stairs.

He plays Skyrim for about twenty minutes before he closes the game without saving with a huff, rubbing at his eyes before crawls back into bed, curling into the blankets and using the pillow to make a hole for air so he can hide there until morning. He's asleep in minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The schooling system here is. a bit odd, based on the high school I went to. We'd get the whole month's homework in a packet, and at the end of the month, we'd test on the material before we moved on to the next month's stuff, then at the end of the year, we'd have the annual standardized tests. It was horrible for anyone who didn't have the discipline to do their homework on their own time, and it was even worse for anyone who couldn't handle what was basically homeschooling if you couldn't get enrolled for your core classes. Didn't think I should try to write about a type of high school I know nothing about, other than from media.


	3. Chapter 3

When Zed turns three, his mother and father get him a dog; a Bernese puppy. Zed names him Haru, because the sunlight in his fur makes him glow. He and his mother take Haru for a walk every morning, down the street a ways and back again. After dinner, after his father has come home from work, they all pack up into the old, yellow car and drive two streets away to play in the dog park until sunset. Their backyard, where Zed and Haru play for half the day, is littered in colorful rope toys and plastic balls. At night, his mother and father sit on the couch, watching the old, staticky television set, Haru's head on their laps and his tail wagging as they pet him until he falls asleep. They set him at the foot of Zed's tiny bed before they go to sleep themselves.

~~~~

Zed pulls into the parking lot of the only bulk store in town, six of his kids in the seats of the van behind him. He opens the sliding door, the child lock keeping the little shits locked in. As each teenager climbs out, he hands them a list of things to get. There's a map of the store duct taped to the fridge at home, laminated with dry erase marker in seven colors, color coded to each person (his own is red), snaking through the aisles. They each have two hundred and ten dollars in cash, because Zed doesn't want to have to math out the inflating prices and he knows they steal some of it for themselves anyway, and they're allowed _one_ item of their own choice, so long as they don't go over the amount in their pockets.

They walk through the door, the security guard nodding at them amiably as they fight over shopping carts briefly. They disperse in the store proper, and Zed heads for the meat section first, then the frozen section.

Most of the kids are used to it, the newest kid on toilet paper and cereal duty, instructed to meet up with Zed in front of the bakery in half an hour.

~~~~

When Zed is five, on his first day of school, his mother walks him there, Haru's leash slack in her hand. Haru is taller than Zed now, and is four inches short of his mother's hip. The school has different colors along each hallway, each color of the rainbow belonging to a different grade. The kindergarten color is red. He wonders if his backpack is wrong, yellow and blue and green. His teacher assures with a laugh that it isn't.  
He peeks inside the room, and sees a dozen other kids his age. His father told him not to cry today, but there are several other kids clinging to their mothers' legs, sobbing. One girl throws herself on the floor in a fit of tears, begging her mother not to go.

His own mother kneels down next to him, her head next to the top of Haru's neck. Haru nudges him, panting, his tongue lolling out to the side of his mouth. Zed leans into his mother's arms, reaching around her middle as best he can with his small arms. She embraces him, kisses him on the forehead, and ushers him into the room with a hand on his back, telling him to have a fun day. He nods, and stands awkwardly next to one of the curved tables in the second row. 

Just as he's putting his bag down on the chair, he remembers he didn't hug Haru goodbye, and runs as fast as he can to catch his mother before she rounds the corner at the end of the hall. His teacher calls after him, and his mother turns to tell him to go back too, but he hugs Haru goodbye and runs back to the classroom before she has a chance. His teacher smiles at him as he passes her, making his way back to his seat.  
They spend the day coloring, and playing, and Zed has learned peoples' names, and that he hates the big round pencils they use that don't have paper over them to keep his hand from sliding down the wood when he writes with it, unlike the colorful crayons.

When his mother and Haru come to get him from school, he tells her about the girl that fell off the roundabout and got a rock stuck in her hand. She smooths his hair down, hands him Haru's leash, and tells him to stay in sight.

When his father comes home, right before dinner, they talk in the dining room as Zed sets the table, climbing up on each of the chairs to put the silverware down on the placemats.

They eat dinner, rice and chicken and a carrot and daikon salad, and Zed chatters about his day. Haru whines at the screen door to the backyard, lonely. After dinner, as always, they go to the park.

~~~~

Zed finds Rie in front of the boxes of cookies, looking bored out of her mind as she debates the mini MnM cookies or the big ones with peanuts. He reminds her that Frennes is allergic to nuts as he stops next to her, scanning her cart to make sure she didn't miss anything. The cereals are color coded, and he nods to himself when he's counted them all.

They go to the checkout lines, busy for a Saturday morning. They both pull out their phones, settling in for a twenty minute wait.

~~~~

When Zed is seven, when his class is in the yellow hallway at school, they go to the movie theater. It's his father's birthday, and it's Thursday, so the theater has a discount on tickets. Haru is at home, in the backyard. 

The movie is boring, but Zed keeps quiet, munching on the popcorn his father bought him. It's a small bag, but Zed is a small person, so he's content.

When the movie ends, and they've all gone to the bathroom, they get back into the car. Zed fiddles with the seatbelt, holding it off of where it cuts into his shoulder. He's at an awkward stage in his growth, where he's too small for the next car seat, but too big for this one, and because their car is so old, the seatbelt doesn't adjust on the wall. It starts raining just as they pull out of the parking lot, and Zed watches the raindrops crawl across the window, imagining they're racing.

They're driving past the park they go to every evening, just pulling up to the crosswalk at a red light when there's a screech of tires ahead of them, and a car across the yellow line fishtails in the water, careening toward them. 

There's a crash of metal on metal, glass and water raining down from the front windshield.

Zed feels something warm running down his face, his neck, and there's a burning sensation in his right leg, but something won't let him turn his head to look. He calls out for his mother, then his father, and it's only when he gets no answer that he starts to feel afraid.

_"Someone get to a payphone! Call 911!"_

_"Hello? Is anyone still alive in there?"_

_"Shit, there's a kid in there!"_

_"Careful, it's in his neck, if you move him wrong, he'll die-"_

_"There's too much blood-"_

_"Listen, I know you're tired, but you have to stay awake, okay-"_

The last thing Zed remembers seeing is his mother's head thrown back in laughter, the sound of the radio going to commercial, his father reaching to change the station. The raindrop he was rooting for didn't reach the end of the window before the one two centimeters above it.

Then he remembers nothing, and he sees only darkness.

~~~~

All the kids help load the van with their groceries, then they all race each other to the farthest cart return. While they're running back, Zed hits the speed dial button for OnomotoPizza, and Sivir audibly groans when she hears his voice.

"Hey, at least I'm giving you three hours notice," he says.

"You do this every two weeks!", she responds.

"Then you should be used to it." Luxanna has told him Sivir has the order written down on a post-it note with all the other regular orders next to the phone anyway.

Ajuna and Ekko are the first ones back, laughing and out of breath as they collapse in their seats in the van.

~~~~

He wakes to the sound of beeping, the feeling of rough cotton sheets over layers of bandages, and bright light filtering through the window. He shuts his eyes against it, a sharp stab of pain going straight from his eyes to the back of his head, radiating down his neck when he flinches.

Everything feels weird, like he's feeling it through a layer of cotton under his skin. He can feel the weight of the blankets over him, but it's muted. When he tries to crane his head to see his surroundings, there's a pull of bandages and something more forein closer to the skin, maybe in it, that tells him he shouldn't. His head feels like he's thinking through a layer of water, heavy and lethargic.

He lays there, exhausted and full of pent up energy at the same time. He tries to move his legs a little bit, but his whole body creaks and aches whenever he moves. He can't see a clock, can't tell the time, but he knows it's been hours when a nurse finally enters the room.

His red eyes follow her as she talks to him, gentle and quiet. She presses a button on the wall behind his head, checks the bags of liquid on the metal hangar next to the bed, and waits there until a doctor comes, talking in that quiet voice, though he says nothing. Her hair is white, like his, but long and darker, almost greyish. It's tied in several rings at three different intervals, hanging down past her hips, with long bangs circling down her face past her shoulders.

When the doctor gets there, the nurse moves back, by the wall. The man talks to her for a moment before turning to Zed, reading something on the clipboard in his hands. The doctor talks to him, too, waiting for responses that never come, so he checks the swelling under Zed's bandages and his pulse and other things before leaving. 

The nurse returns to the side of his bed, bringing the chair from the corner of the room to sit on. Her hands glow green as she holds them an inch over his body; almost immediately, he can feel the aching in his joints lessen, the light throbbing in his neck stop. She keeps talking to him, and he follows her movements with his eyes, unable to move anything else, until he falls asleep again.

~~~~

When Zed honks the horn as he pulls into the driveway, there's a small army of kids and teens running out to help, and the whole job goes quickly; bags of produce and boxes of paper products and stacks of meat are carried into the kitchen, where it's set down in sections. The vegetables are next to the fridge; the rice, cans, and boxed goods are in front of the cupboards; the boxes of instant ramen are in front of the sink, and the fruit is already layed out on the counter. The meat is stacked into the deep freezer in the garage, the six bread loafs are layed out on the counter next to the sink, and some of the kids have already run off with a few of the snack items, which are on the other side of the sink.

Zed cracks his knuckles, and snorts as Kayn mentions his homework before running off, every single other teenager taking his lead.

~~~~

Soraka, the nurse with the white hair, tells him his father died on impact, which means he felt no pain. His mother died in surgeries, and she'd been in a coma since the car hit them, meaning she also felt no pain. She tells him he was asleep during the funeral, that they're buried in a cemetary across town; she tells him that the neighbors around his street paid for it, and several of them came in while he was asleep to leave flowers and get-well cards. She tells him he was asleep for a month. He's glad, decades later, that she didn't sugar coat anything.

She tells him that he'll be healthy enough to be released from the hospital by the end of the week. She asks him if he has any family he knows of; he writes, shakily, on the pad of paper she gave him days ago, that the only one he knows of is a grandmother that died when he was four. He writes that the lady next door, with the three boys he'd play with on weekends, would babysit him when his parents were out.  
Soraka nods, writing something on the clipboard she always holds when she isn't healing his little pains.

~~~~

The bread is lined up on the counter, right against the fridge. The ramen is dumped uncerimoniously into the drawer under the silverware, and all the other boxes of it are stacked in the space above the cupboards. The veggies are tetrised into the two drawers in the fridge, and he still has to press the cabbage down on the spring onions to make it fit. The boxed goods are lined up on the second shelf in the pantry, the cans on the shelf below them. He rinses all the fruit off, peels off the stickers, and sticks it in the cheap wicker baskets on the bar counter. The rest of the snack items are stacked up on the very top shelf of the pantry, where not even Kayn can get to them without making a ton of noise. The potatoes and bags of cereal are lined up at the very bottom on the floor of the pantry, and the bags of rice and beans are piled on the third shelf up. The toilet paper and paper towels and kleenex are tossed between the washer and dryer.

It takes him an hour to do it, but finally, he has time to remember that he forgot to put juice on the list. He just sighs and writes it down for Monday, while the kids are all at school. As an afterthought, he writes down Khada's favorite wine next to it.

~~~~

Soraka brings him a gift on his last day in the hospital: a scarf, crimson red with silver pompoms on the ends. She knits, she says, in her spare time at home. She says there will be a man who will come to see him tomorrow, to pick him up and take him to his neighbor's, where they'll use the spare key to let him pick up his essential things from his home.

The man turns out to be tall, gruff, and not openly friendly, not that Zed minds. He hasn't been able to bring himself to speak since he woke up. He's opened his mouth, trying, but no sound comes out, and the doctor says there's nothing wrong with his throat, but that it's probably trauma-based temporary mutism.

The man drives slowly, carefully, and Zed clings tightly to the seatbelt over the blue booster seat in the back row.

When they get to his neighbor's house, she ushers them inside, her three grandsons, two of them the same age as him and the other three years older, standing awkwardly in the hallway. Val, one of the younger two, moves to step forward, looks like he wants to say something to him, and Zed feels a spike of fear. Something in his head won't let him talk, something in his head is broken; even if it's only for a little bit, he doesn't know when it'll go away, when it'll heal. She brings him to the backdoor, holding onto the counter for support as she opens it and watches all the breath in him go out in one sharp exhale.

Haru wags his tail and barks once, and Zed runs, as fast as his legs can carry him after three months of disuse, the plastic shoe over the red cast on his right foot clunking on the concrete of the patio. He falls in the dirt, clinging to the dog, who licks all the open skin on his face, who whines and whimpers as Zed holds onto him in the dirt.

He's only cried once, when Soraka told him his parents were gone; now, he's sobbing into Haru's fur, choking on his breaths and tears.

~~~~

In the back yard, Zed's got the kids playing keep-up with a beach ball, standing in a circle and knocking it up into the air and dashing to the other side to be near their friends.

He watches from the kitchen window, scrubbing at a piece of dried sauce on one of the plates before he sets it into the dishwasher to dry.

Jovn changes the channel on the TV to an anime, and Zed snorts, watching the pixels fight.

~~~~

'Essential' means clothes, mostly. The man lets him get his favorite toys, a stuffed animal, his favorite blanket, one book, and his toothbrush. He manages to fit his rock collection in between his jacket and his pants anyway. While Zed is packing the suitcase from the closet in his parents' bedroom, the man walks around the house, collecting photos from the frames on the walls, on the counters, on his mother's nightstand. He finds the photo books in a box in the closet while Zed is in his room, and the man carefully puts the photos inside, putting the books into Zed's school bag, in front of the textbooks.

~~~~

Zed settles on the couch with a groan, watching Kayn run a brush through his damp hair. The kids turned on the hose in the back yard, and almost everyone in the house joined in, using it as a weapon against the late autumn heat, though they were freezing by the time Zed called a stop to it. They're watching The Lion King now, all nineteen kids gathered in the living room, waiting for the pizza to show up.

Ten minutes into the movie, Kayn gives up on his hair with a huff, weaving around the kids on the floor until he can park his butt at Zed's feet, handing the brush over. Zed laughs as he works with the dark hair, brushing it until it dries and Kayn looks half asleep, then slowly braiding it down the boy's back. 

~~~~

They have to put Zed in foster care. There's nowhere else for him to go; the neighbor with her grandsons doesn't have space for him, or a car to take him to his follow-up appointments, but she promises to take very good care of Haru, promises he can visit whenever his guardians will bring him. He's always welcome, she says. She tucks a piece of paper into his hand with the house phone number. He hugs her goodbye, hugs his friends goodbye, and refuses to cry again as he hugs Haru goodbye.

He doesn't see them again for a long time.

~~~~

Sivir finally shows up with the pizza at around 1 PM, twenty boxes stacked up in the back seat of Galio's car. The kids cheer and croud around Zed at the door, watching him sign the paper and hand her a fifty dollar tip. They part around him like a school of fish, regrouping two inches behind him to steal their lunch from the boxes on the counter the second he puts them down. It also serves as dinner and snack, but it'll all be gone by 10 PM, he knows.

~~~~

The first house he ends up in is out in the hills past the town, where he is largely ignored. His 'parents' tried to talk to him for a while, but he just. Can't. So unless they need an answer from him, they leave him alone. He plays with their cat with the mouse toys, but it claws him when he pets it. 

He throws grass at the ravens in the field, digs for cool rocks, spends a whole afternoon slowly shimmying his body up a tree to look inside a bird's nest, just to see the eggs. 

He was taken off the attendance list at school, but his 'father' says he can start again this fall. He'll have to take the year again, and all his friends will have moved on, but he might make some new ones, the man says. Zed shrugs. He knows this family will only keep him for a few months into the school year, just past Halloween, and the next family might make him move schools, so he won't bother making new friends.  
The doctor takes the cast off his leg a month after he moves to the house in the hills, and Soraka catches him on his way out, pressing a small, wrapped package into his hands. 

He climbs the tree with the nest to open it, four branches higher than the nest. 

It's a beanie, crimson red, with silver trim and a pompom on the top. He wonders how she makes the pompoms with knitting needles.

~~~~

The whole house is in a mandatory quiet period, with the two youngest kids down for a nap, and the rest reading, doing homework, or working on weird hobbies in the living room. 

Kayn has some pictures open on his phone, a notebook on his lap and a pencil in hand, and a map on the coffee table that looks suspiciously like a map of cop patrols.

Zed grabs the red marker from the kitchen, marking three lines along the roads that Kayn, Talon, and Akakli should avoid in their next adventure. Kayn looks at it just long enough to take in the new marks on the map before he looks down at the sketch on his paper.

Zed reaches for the bag of crochet needles and half-finished projects under the end table, where even the youngest kids know to give it a wide berth.

~~~~

On the first day of school, it's raining, and Zed stands next to three other kids waiting for the school bus. His new backpack is crimson red and black, and he put silver duct tape on the zippers. 

His 'mother' packed a lunch for him, a sandwich, a bag of sliced apples, and a bag of fried potato skins. 

He's worried about when he gets to school, wonders if his teacher will already know about his inability to talk, or if he'll have to spend the next few months being the 'problem' of the class. He's never been a 'problem' before. 

His voice still doesn't work, no matter how many therapy sessions he sits through, no matter how hard he tries. He can whistle, if he really needs someone's attention, or clap, but those seem rude, and he just... Doesn't want to be a 'problem'. He has enough 'problems' of his own, he doesn't want to be someone else's.

He gets on the bus when it arrives, sits right behind the driver where nobody likes to sit, and clings to his backpack, watching the rural houses go by. The closer they get to the school, the more he has to remind himself not to suck on his thumb. He used to do that, when he had just moved here, and his therapist said it was normal, but he should try to remind himself not to do it anyway. He tries to remind himself that that's what babies do, and he's not a baby.

When the bus pulls into the lot, everyone files off, and he gets a bit lost on his way to his class. It's a new school for him, run down, with a grey tinge to everything. They had to enroll him in a new school when the bus route for his first school changed so that they didn't go this far out of town anymore.

When he finally gets there, his teacher already knows about his mutism, and hands him a safety pin name tag to put on his shirt.

The knot in his stomach goes away, and he finds the desk with his name on it, burying his head in his arms until class actually starts.

~~~~

When the two preschoolers finally get up from their naps and are walked through bathroom time and hand-washing, Zed hands out coloring pages, doing a headcount twice and all but wrestling Taisah and Yoko out of their rooms to join it. There's colored pencils, markers, crayons, he found pastels in a box under the shitty wax sticks, and half the kids spend the hour doodling on the side of the page rather than coloring it. 

Zed somehow finds enough magnets and space on the fridge to fit everything there anyway.

~~~~

He knew he wouldn't be staying with this family, but he's going to miss that tree. It had the perfect amount of shade in the branches without blocking his light, and the cat was just starting to warm up to him.  
He's being introduced to a single 'father' in a mainstream cafe, who lives in an apartment complex downtown, right next to the community college. It's loud, is his first thought, after spending so much time in the country.

He's lived there a day before he realizes this is one of the foster parents he was warned about, by an older kid at the agency where he met his first family; the kind that leaves you to your own devices, doesn't care enough to buy any food for you, spends all the money allotted by the agency on booze, just wants you to shut up and stay out of sight.

Zed has to move schools again, because the one he was at doesn't have busses that go into the downtown area, and he doesn't think he can walk thirty miles and survive the trip.

The man throws his empty bottles at Zed if he walks too loudly on the tile, he yells at him if Zed doesn't clean up the trash around the house that the man leaves, he yells at him if he catches Zed taking food from the fridge, or coloring, or reading, or existing. And when the man is sober, he's worse. Zed wears long sleeves well into the spring time to cover the marks of cigarette burns on his arms, and his teacher had to teach him how to sew his clothes and shoes back together. 

His eighth birthday is spent hiding in a dark room that is easily the cleanest one in the apartment, the window open to vent out the stench of booze and vomit from the rest of the building.  
He misses the quiet house in the hills with the cat and the tree.

~~~~

Shen calls at around 7 PM, just as Zed is getting the youngest kid to brush his teeth. 

"Stop chewing on it. Yo, what's up?"

"Hey, what do I do if I lit a pot lid on fire?", Shen says, skipping the greeting, completely monotone.

"... Holy shit, Shen." He grabs the tiny hand holding the unmoving toothbrush. "I said stop chewing on it. Brush."

"I passed out on the couch with oil on the stove and threw the lid over it to put it out, but it, uh. Didn't. Kennen, go out to the backyard, please?"

"Put, like... Flour on it? I don't know..." He hears cupboards opening in the background as Shen looks around for it. "No wait, that's what they use to fry shit-" Zed leans around the door to the bathroom, holding onto the doorjam with one hand and the phone with the other. "Hey, Rie! What do you use to put out a grease fire?"

"A fire extinguisher?", comes her answer, somewhere downstairs.

"Assume he doesn't have one! Brush your teeth, damn it."

"Baking soda, then."

"Rie says baking soda, not flour." Shen says nothing for about a minute, and Zed is walking Juba to his room, his teeth finally brushed. 

"Cool, thanks.", Shen says, ten seconds before he starts coughing. "Thatwasn'tbakingsoda thatwasn'tbakingsoda-"

~~~~

The day the man throws Zed's photo album on the stove and lights it, because he caught Zed digging through the fridge, because Zed hadn't eaten since Friday at school and it was Sunday night, and he was _hungry_ , when the man threw him into the counter so hard he stumbled and hit his head on the handle of the sink cabinet, is the day that Zed grabs the charring book, runs to his room, and locks the door, thanking every deity he can think of that the old book has solid wooden covers. 

He packs all the things he can into his backpack, throwing his textbooks on his bed, and scrambling out the window onto the fire escape, down down down to the ground floor. 

He runs to the nearest store and begs begs begs, trying to mime to the lady at the counter to let him call someone until she sees his 'father' at the door, and that's when she grabs Zed's hand and pulls him to the back room, sitting him in the spinny office chair as she walks back out to threaten the man out of her cafe.

She returns thirty minutes later, irritated, with her black-purple hair and black-purple wings all ruffled and messy. She takes one look at eleven year old Zed, sniffling on the chair, clinging to his burnt photo album, before she asks, "Who did you want to call?"

She doesn't bat an eye when he reaches for the pen and pad of sticky notes on the desk to explain everything. He's not even sure how he would have talked over the phone, now that he thinks about it.

~~~~

Khada calls at around 10 PM, just as Zed is tossing a ten year old onto the top bunk by the window of the purple room. 

"Yo, what's up?"

"I dropped my fucking tablet in the sink, I'm so mad."

"Quit watching NCIS when you're washing dishes, then."

"I was facetiming Sona, _actually._ "

"You and this fucking kid, I swear. _Stay._ " He glares halfheartedly at the all the kids in their beds, and he knows that the second the door is closed, they'll be back up, but he really wants to go back to the Gravity Falls rerun he's missing downstairs.

"She's got the most skill with a string instrument I've seen in _ages_ , alright?"

"Shen lit his kitchen on fire again," Zed says, when the pause stretches too long.

"... Holy shit. And we trust this sleep deprived monkey to save lives?"

~~~~

"Hi, this is Morgana, I've got one of your foster kids in my cafe because the guy you had him living with threw his photo album in a fire for trying to take food out of the fridge? I'm feeding him now, but he says he hasn't eaten anything since Friday at school."

Zed's trying not to shove a chocolate muffin into his face, his stomach clenching painfully around the best food he's had in months. If he throws this up later, he's going to be _so_ mad.

"Zed In'ei? I think I said that right. Yeah, we're in a cafe, in the middle between 3rd street and 12th avenue? It's called Sinful Succulence, really purple. Cool, thanks."

~~~~

Kayn's phone almost vibrates itself off the table, like it's trying to commit suicide with how much Talon and Akali are texting him. Kayn is ignoring it in favor of the 'kids show' he was adamantly avoiding an hour ago. Zed learned not to diss cartoons a long time ago, when Khada all but forcefed him anime for half of middle school. 

~~~~

When the man who picked him up from the hospital that very first day arrives at the cafe, Zed's stomach has settled, his head has stopped hurting, and Morgana has actually made him smile for the first time in years. She sends him off with a bag of cookies, some frozen blueberries, and the first cup of soy-milk bubble tea he's seen since he was five. He's in better spirits now than he has been in ages. The man, apparently named Lucian, pulls into the drive thru of a burger chain, getting Zed a kid's meal and a black coffee for himself, just to get something more solid than pastries in the kid's stomach.

Zed sits in the front seat, finally, and Lucian asks him questions while they're parked in a lot far across town from that apartment; why'd he run away, why hadn't the man been feeding him, why this, why that. Lucian already knows, Zed thinks, but he might have to ask anyway. Rules, regulations. There has to be a very good reason to take Zed out of a home. 

Zed writes everything down. Shows him the burned photo album, the other one safely tucked in his bag. He pulls his sleeves up to show the cigarette burns, pulls out some of the patched clothes, shows him the patches on the clothes and shoes he's had for two years that pinch his feet so much it hurts, the patches taken from clothes he doesn't fit anymore. He explains that his fifth grade _teacher_ had to take him to a second-hand store to get him newer clothes that fit on a Monday holiday when the man didn't realize there wasn't school. He shows him the bruises and jagged cuts from the glass bottles, from being shoved into walls and cabinets, and tells the story about the one time he had to hide on the top shelf of the linen closet, where there was no space to move, from one dawn till the next, because the man didn't have enough money for booze and cigarettes. He pulls out the photos that same teacher had developed for him, taken from a disposable camera he'd also bought for him, of the piles of trash, of the complete lack of food in the fridge, the boxes of take-out that Zed hadn't been allowed to partake in. The scar from the two inch gash on his side when he was nine that Zed had had to learn how to stitch closed on his own. The blood in his hair from this evening, when he was shoved into the cabinet handle.

Lucian asks why Zed hadn't said something sooner, hadn't called from the school, hadn't done something to get help. Zed writes that he was afriad of what the man would do, if the agency showed up to investigate and didn't find sufficient proof to take him somewhere else.

They're there until midnight, and Zed's head aches from the exhaustion, the relief of finally talking to someone who can actually do something about it, from the bruise and cut on his head, and from hyperventilating and trying very hard not to cry. He succeeds, though he wonders if it would have made a better case if he had.

It doesn't matter, when the man checks them into a hotel for the night, since there's no beds or substantial food at the agency, and they'll go there tomorrow. Zed's supposed to write a list of all the things in his room, and anywhere else in the house, that belong to him that he wants the man to pick up tomorrow afternoon. Zed will not be going, he's told; there's a very nice lady at the counter who will find a new home for him; the third time's the charm, after all, right?

~~~~

Kayn _finally_ picks up the damn phone at 11, despite Zed telling him to just put it on silent. He disappears upstairs, walking about as quietly as Zed does, the pad of paper tucked under his arm with notes that Zed wrote while Kayn wasn't looking.

~~~~

It is.

The new home they find him is so much nicer. It's in a neighborhood similar to the one he grew up in, and the man, Kusho, tells him that his son is about Zed's age. Shen, he says, is in the same grade as him. Zed will have his own room, and if he's hungry, he's welcome to take any food he wants from the fridge or counter. There's nothing but meal stuff in the cabinets, but when Kusho is sure Zed can cook more safely than Shen, he's welcome to that, too, he says.

When they get there, Kusho carries the bigger box of Zed's clothes while Zed carries his backpack and the smaller one, and they go up the stairs to the only room with a closed door. Shen pokes his head out of his room as they pass, waving hello. The majority of the house is painted beige, though the bedroom at the end of the hall is painted sky blue, with clouds along the ceiling board. Zed's room is beige, and Kusho tells him that if he wants to paint it any other color, they can go to a hardware store this weekend, or the next, or the one after that. 

Zed's packed all of his clothes into the dozen drawers available to him, only using three. He hangs his two hoodies up in the closet, and opens the window to let in the fresh air. He's never seen a screen over a window before. He puts his photo albums and backpack, now empty of everything but school books and homework he had to do at school, on the white wooden desk between the two open windows. There's a five-pronged fan with a weird curly lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling, but he doesn't turn it on; the sunlight is plenty enough to see by.

Zed hears the other boy, Shen, run out of his room and halfway down the stairs, before he seems to turn back up the stairs and down the hall toward Zed's room.

"Hey, I'm gonna go out and play with my friend down the street. Wanna come? I don't have an extra bike, but I have a scooter you can use, and Khada might have something in his garage," he says. Zed blinks, startled. He hasn't had time to play with other kids since he moved to the apartment; he had to do his homework during recess and lunch, or he'd get in trouble at home for doing it. 

He nods, and then flinches when Shen grabs his hand and drag-pulls him down the stairs and past the kitchen, where he calls to Kusho that they're going to play down the street. 

"Just make sure Zed knows the way back, Shen."

Shen's already out the door as he calls back a 'kay!', and Zed has to pull his hand free to buy himself the time to close the door behind them, Shen grabbing his hand again the second it latches shut.

They grab the bike and the scooter, Shen explains the brake on it, and lets Zed do an expirimental circle around the garage before he's rushing out, pausing at the end of the driveway, on the sidewalk, waiting for Zed to follow. 

They go seven houses down, where Khada, a whole head taller than him, and Yasuo, who's Zed's height despite being about three years younger, are sprawled out on the open driveway of a house with pastel yellow siding. They're drawing with chalk, the older boy with the shorter hair drawing elaborate flowers while the younger one mostly draws stick figures with swords. Khada waves them over, pushing the chalk toward Zed as Shen grabs a dark blue stick and follows Yasuo around the driveway, drawing fight scenes with the eight year old. 

"We have to wash it all away later so I have space to draw more tomorrow, but you can draw whatever you want."

Zed doesn't know what to draw, so he tries to copy Khada's flowers. The colors don't look as good, and Khada makes a face when he sees the green and orange one.

"Try blues. Shen might trade you for the darker one. The ones that are closer to each other match better."

He does as he's directed, tapping Shen to get his attention, and writing it out in small letters he can barely read on the edge of the pavement. Shen smiles, though, when he understands, and trades his blue for the violet Khada wasn't using.

His flowers still don't look as good as Khada's, one petal is too long here and the one on that side is too fat, but the other boy indulges his need to write out their conversations. His handwriting is prettier than Zed's, even in chalk.

They're shaking in the breeze when Shen and Zed go home, absolutely soaked from the water fight that ensued while they were cleaning the chalk off the smooth concrete.

~~~~  
Zed washes the few dishes that ended up in the sink that night, mostly cups and one set of silverware from when he had to cut two slices of pizza into pieces for the toddlers. He's got his phone leaned precariously on a vase of flowers on the windowsill over the sink, the finals of the parkour tag games he's been following for the last week playing on youtube as he washes them and sets them in the dishwasher to dry. 

God, he hopes Khada doesn't catch him doing this; he's lost three phones already because his phone keeps falling in the water when he bumps the wall just right reaching for the soap.

Varus keeps telling him to just buy a waterproof case, but Zed is stubborn.

~~~~

They end up painting Zed's room crimson red two weeks later, and Khada comes over to paint sprawling, spiraling designs and flowers with the smaller bucket of silver paint.

The first thing Zed said, the first words he'd been able to speak in years, were six months later, was when he saw the inside of Khada's room, absolutely covered in soft pink and white lotuses painted over a deep wine red, gold lining where shadows and lines should be.

"Holy shit, Khada."

~~~~

Zed still has no idea how Soraka makes pompoms with knitting needles, but he's quite happy with the black and blue scarf he throws at Kayn as the kid tries to sneak out of the house at midnight, bag of paints at his side, respirator hanging around his neck, and his braid pinned as much out of the way as possible, his windbreaker stained with spray paint.

~~~~

Kusho lets him finish the school year in the dingy school he was at, and his grades go up so much now that he actually has time to study, and more than half an hour to do his homework.

Zed, Shen, Khada, Yasuo's older brother Yone, and one girl down the street named Janna are all in the same grade. Janna's a little grumpy sometimes that she's got no girls to play with, but she runs faster than all of them, so they tell her she doesn't need any. She's got plenty at school, anyway, and they come over for the parties, too. She makes a face, because Vi is too rough for her to enjoy playing with, and Caitlyn's tea parties are boring unless little Jinx wrecks them.

Kusho asks Zed what he wants for his birthday, and Zed can't really think of anything. He's got everything he needs, he's more than content using Shen's scooter, and Kusho already bought him a lot of new clothes and shoes. The only thing Zed wants, he's afraid of asking for. 

He does anyway, a week before his birthday, because he knows his fear is misplaced. Kusho hasn't yelled at him, hasn't even been _angry_ , even when Zed drops a dish on the floor, or knocks something over, or he and Shen track mud in from outside, though they help clean it up every time.

He gives Kusho the piece of paper with the faded phone number on it on Monday, carefully timed so that Zed doesn't have time to talk about it, or he'll miss the bus. There's a note on the other side, where Zed wrote in small handwriting, explaining who the number will call.

They go over every day that weekend; Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, Sunday morning. Zed hugs the grandmother, and waves at the three boys, and the five of them spend the whole time playing with Haru, who's old now, but gentler than ever, petting him, and Zed _does not cry_ Sunday night when they leave. Varus still sneaks a travel pack of tissues into his sweater pocket as he and his grandmother see them out the door, Kai and Valmar waving from the window.

Monday afternoon, when Zed and Shen come home from school, Haru runs up to them, tail wagging. Zed didn't mean for Kusho to bring Haru home, just wanted to visit, but this is better.

They visit the grandmother every Sunday, and sometimes Khada comes too, though he spends a lot more time with Varus than them. They bring photos, and Khada sends beautiful pictures painted on cardstock. She pins them up around the kitchen, and down the hall, mixed with the hundred other pictures of her family. They bring Haru sometimes; less so as he gets older, though.

Zed is fifteen when she gets sick with pneumonia, in their freshman year of high school. Kusho is the one who drives her to the hospital, and the neighborhood he grew up in collects money to help pay for the funeral when she passes in her sleep, though Kusho puts a lot of his own money toward it, too. 

Zed cries at the funeral, then sobs when they find Haru, absurdly old for a Bernese at almost thirteen years old, has died in his sleep while they were gone, sleeping at the foot of Zed's bed.

They bury him in the back yard, four feet down, and several of the kids around the street come to help dig it. The next month, when Kusho can afford it, they put a small slab of stone at the head of the grave, Haru's name and age engraved over an image of a Bernese puppy. 

Kusho helps Varus, barely 18, take care of his brothers, helps him find work and an apartment close to their school and the college, helps him remember that vegetables are important.

~~~~

Zed _finally_ finds himself in bed an hour after Kayn leaves, deciding against staying up till dawn to make sure he comes home. Kayn will probably stay at Talon's house tonight anyway, or Talon will come here, and Zed will wake when he hears the shower start running as they wash the paint out of each others' long hair without turning the light in the bathroom on. 

He spares one glance at the silver and black lotus that covers two feet of space above his headboard in the room he shares with Kayn and Jovn, far more elaborate than the ones that were in the room Akali sleeps in now. 

Tomorrow, Lucian's going to show up at around 10 AM for coffee and to inspect the house, to make sure the kids are alright. He needs to vacuum, and he left a note to remind Kayn to put his aerosol paints in the attic, but other than that, everything should be fine. He'll call Shen at noon and make sure the house didn't burn down, maybe go over on Monday when the kids are all at school to actually make sure.

It's the sixth year he forgets that Monday is his father's birthday, but he hasn't forgotten Kusho's, circled in silver sharpie on the calendar over one of the dressers, two weeks from Friday. He'll have to make sure Shen has his schedule open for it, so they can ask Khada what two flowers they should get, even though they know he'll say Gladioli. He still has some incense sticks from last year, and one of them will buy the persimmons Kusho liked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zed is only a few months older than Shen and Khada, but they were both born right after the grade cutoff for the school year, so they're all in the same grade. Yone is actually a year older than all of them, but he had to repeat a year at some point, so he's stuck with the dumbasses. Janna hates all of them, but the internet doesn't come into any force until they're in senior year so she can't hide inside and talk to her friends unless she steals the phone from the kitchen, and her mom kicks her out after an hour, anyway. They all bully each other to take computer courses in college, but Yasuo is the one everyone calls for help fixing their crap anyway.
> 
> Zed wears glasses until he graduates from college and gets a job, and then when he's working in a shitty burger joint he gets sick of smudging them trying to push them up his nose with his elbow or wrist or whatever, and gets contacts. He loses his glasses all the time, so when he has to switch to those, he spends like 3 days blind as shit until someone in the house manages to find them.
> 
> I fit a lot more characters in here than I planned to, but it feels a lot less forced than the last chapter, so I'm good with it I think
> 
> In'ei literally just shadow lmao


	4. Chapter 4

He knows it's his job, that he gets paid for it, but if he has to listen to one more shitty rendition of 'Baby', he's going to fucking shoot something. Maybe his own foot, just so he can fucking leave.

It was funny the first two times. That was it. He has the headache from hell, because Kai _would not_ let him sleep the night before, texting him until three in the morning about the most inane shit.

Other than the fifteen pisspoor renditions of 'Baby', the auditions for The Diviners are going great. There's a decent amount of people who can sing, there's a decent amount of people who knew not to show up just to fuck around, and he knows exactly which kids he's going to 'highly recommend' stay on for future plays.

The last bell rings, and he's finally allowed to kick everyone out of the auditorium, throw the notes he's got (totally not covered in doodles just to distract himself from the same song over and over again) into a maroon binder, and _leave_.

Traffic getting out of the school parking lot is bad, nothing compared to the freeway leading out of the major area of the city. It calms down the farther out he goes, and he pulls off the freeway maybe two miles away from home to get to the plaza that has the Ionian noodle restaurant to get four takeout bowls of cold udon for the group. He's not sure Varus will be home before midnight, but he knows for a fact that Valmar and Kai worked morning shifts today, and he's learned that hot meals end badly with Varus when nobody exactly has the energy to reheat or cook another serving without the microwave. Khada will never budge on his stance on the nuking machine; Varus is the only reason they even have it, a wistful craving for kids' foods on a regular basis with no energy to use the actual oven.

When Khada does make it home, he hands two of the bowls of udon to Kai, who looks absolutely exhausted. Varus's car isn't in either driveway, so he sets one bowl in the fridge and eats his own, notes from the auditions spread out over the kitchen table.

The house is old, willed to Zed when he came of age. He stayed there for a few years while Shen and Khada were in college, but he moved as soon as he could afford another place, not wanting to deal with the distressingly few memories tied to it.

When Varus's son was born and the cramped house next door became a little too much for five people, maybe six months after Shen had finished his residency and had been able to afford his own home, Khada had gone to find a place of his own when Zed had asked him if it was alright, and offered the place to Varus.

Nobody thought it was a good idea to let the man live alone after the incident, six years later, and Khada had moved back in.

There's a lot of incidents, in their group of friends, that they don't talk about. You could probably count on two hands how many have gone to college, and fewer actually got a degree.

Shen, of course, got his MD; Zed barely finished a bachelors in Social Work, and spent the next few years saving money to buy a house big enough to open a group home, taking in the most troubled kids in the system; Yasuo moved out of state to a college across the continent to get a bachellors in _martial arts_ , a degree Khada didn't even know was a thing; Varus had gotten a masters in journalism and a bachellors in videography; Khada himself got three degrees of varying levels in theatre and music, and one in psychology. Everyone but Yasuo found a job pertaining to their degrees, but the man has drifted between about thirty different jobs and still not settled on a career, or an area of town, or a useful major, and nobody really knows what he's doing. He's probably fine. Zed tells him Yone's grave has not seen a speck of dust in years.

He's probably fine.

~

Khada has marked off the audition names that he wants to keep an eye on, notes on their performances, strengths, and weaknesses scribbled in a notebook on the side.

Varus crashes through the door at eleven, covered in soot.

"Food's in the fridge. Cold udon," Khada calls from the table.

"Thanks," the man mumbles, choosing to take a shower first.

~

He returns twenty minutes later, his hair less grey and more its usual pearlescent white, his long-sleeved button down, work vest, and slacks traded for flannel pants and a black tee. It's nearly Halloween, and the heat of whatever fire he and Janna were reporting did not follow him.

He sets his laptop down on the table, sleek and thin next to the short and wide ceramic bowl he dumped his noodles in.

He has the volume off, which means he's got at least five windows open around the screen showing different news channels, subtitles in white and varying brands of yellow.

His eyes are narrowed so much he's practically squinting, leaned over the bowl maybe six inches from the screen and his clenched fist supporting his head as he leans against his elbow to the side. The flavors in the broth have dulled as they soaked into the noodles while they sat in the fridge, and those turned to mush hours ago, not that Khada thinks the man would notice, in his current state.

He keeps kicking the leg of the chair in his idleness, like an unconcious effort to stay awake. His hair hangs lank and damp down his back, with his bangs obscuring the left side of his face.

When the bowl looks about as empty as it's going to get, Khada clicks his pen and stands, dropping it on the notebook. He takes the bowl from Varus, who seems to start back to alertness, glancing at the bowl just as it leaves his field of view. He slips lower in the chair and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes with a tired sigh.

"Get some rest. I'll have something set out for you in the morning," Khada says quietly, draining the liquid into the sink and dumping the food into the trash. He'll pick something that doesn't change texture so quickly tomorrow night, he thinks, as he rinses the dishes; not that the man slouching at the table behind him would notice, or care.

Varus stays there for a moment, the broadcasts and a twitter feed open in eight different windows positioned strategically around the screen, before standing with another sigh and arching his back in a stretch. He gathers his things and pads quietly across the linoleum and wood boards to reach his room at the end of the hall.

Tomorrow should be better for both of them, Khada thinks. For Varus, it will mostly be editing clips from the videos he shot with Janna today, the fire tonight having been a live broadcast to Valoran News. For Khada, there will be fewer of the joke auditions, and more of the ones who actually mean to try. Just two more days of dealing with brats that couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, and then he has the weekend to decide who he will call back for more auditions the coming Monday.

~

There's two months between the auditions and the showings, and he's mostly settled on the dozen students he wants in the show. Most of them are already in his Performing Arts class, which is fine, because that means he can have the ones that are on the roster study their lines in class while he works on costumes and designing props, passing shit off to the stagecrew that are in woodworking. He's had to pay Graves every other month to let him and the students that know what they're doing to use the equipment in the room after school lets out, which still only gives them an hour and a half each day to work on things, but it gives him enough time to get everything done. He's had to remind Graves that it gives the students a chance to practice, but Khada has also had to put the man on speed dial because he himself didn't know how the machines worked when the arrangement started.

There's about two hundred kids through the four Performing Arts classes he teaches, staggered with the two AP Psychology classes and lunch.

He can actually feel himself going a little more insane every school year, and he _knows_ he has too much on his plate, between two plays, the dancing and orchestra groups' performances, and setting everything up for those and the field trips that go with it. He's only been here a few years, and his schedule is about as packed as Varus's and as restrictive as Zed's, and when he thinks back on his life, he still has no clue how he ended up there.

He distinctly remembers his mentor lamenting the idea that, as soon as an actor starts teaching the art, their own career has reached it's end. Shen keeps trying to drill into his mind, though, that it's just changed course, not ended, and so long as he passes on the skills he has to the next generation, his 'something something legacy' will keep going.

As he looks at Lulu, who has spent the entire period staring blankly at her script, he's not sure which one stuck more in his head. He is sure, however, that none of the script has stuck in Lulu's head, and that the rows of kids in another hour playing the same keys on their instruments over and over again have not improved, and that half of the choir in another hour are sick, and that the gymnastics team is easily the worst one he's worked with in the handful of years he's worked at this school, and that the majority of the kids in his AP Psychology class don't actually care about the material so much as they do the credits, aiming for the other teacher that was rumored to be an easy A.

When he gets home almost two hours later, his head pounds and his clothes are covered in saw dust.

He gets a text as he pulls into the driveway from Varus, saying he'll actually be home in half an hour.

Khada sits in his car for ten minutes, leaning his head on the steering wheel and cherishing the muted silence in the steel box.

He finally gets out and brushes the woodchips off the seat, heading inside to take a shower.

~

Varus smells like smoke again, taking the shower as soon as Khada leaves it, though the hot water hasn't come back completely. They say nothing as they pass each other in the hall, though Varus looks far more rested than he did last night.

Khada throws one of the few meat items in the freezer into the sink, filling it halfway with cold water, turning it off when he hears the shower turn on. Shen texts him as he sets his binder on the table, and when he looks, Khada bursts into laughter.

By the time Varus makes his way out of the bathroom in fresh clothes, Khada is still leaning against the table, chuckling as he scrolls through the images. Khada hears him coming, scrolls up to the first image Shen sent, and it's Varus's soft snort of laughter that sets Khada off again.

Varus sets up his laptop when they both manage to stop laughing at Shen's expense, and Khada takes the moment to send a response.

_we needed that laugh, thanks_

**_I'm going to strangle them._ **

_its against the hippo oath_

**_Hippocratic_ **

_hippo oath_

**_Khada Jhin, I WILL add you to the list of people I'm going to strangle one day._ **

_lolk_

**_> :(_ **

~

Over dinner (pork, rice, mushrooms, green onions, it tastes like Varus snuck in a shit-ton of soy sauce again, Khada is not buying another bottle when they run out), they have an actual conversation for the first time in days.

"What do you know about Draven?" Varus asks, rather out of the blue.

"Probably the most popular kid in the school, why?"

"He was talking to Janna about getting a job as an anchor."

Khada hums. "Thought he'd go into something entertainment. I guess news counts, but it's not one of the things I'd have thought he'd try for."

Varus shrugs. "He'd have to get into the university as soon as fall semester starts."

"Mm, he's already working on his associates, there's a lot of kids doing the concurrent enrollment thing lately."

"Does he know it pays fuck all and takes at least six years to get into?"

Khada shrugs, eats his food, and writes himself a note to talk to Draven about it on Monday.

~

He gets a lot more than he bargained for; Monday brings a new student in the middle of the semester, a new senior student from the next major city over, who chats happily with his desk neighbor in Khada's second period Psychology class. Monday also brings the storm from hell, thunder crashing outside and rain _pouring_ in from the window he left open on the very humid Friday before.

When he manages to catch Draven in his first period drama class, he does what he can to pass on Varus's message about getting into the news industry, how Draven will have to take a probably unpaid internship and spend at least four, prefferably six, years in college before he can actually get the job, and that the job pays terribly, but Draven seems to already know most of that, either from the internet or from his talk with Janna.

In second period, when he gets over the anger at not even being _told_ there's a new student in his class, he has to spend the last fifteen minutes explaining the homework to the new yordle, and sends him off with an admitedly frightening stack of old notes and lists of pages in the textbook to catch him up on the material.

At lunch, Shen texts him, asking him if he can check in on Kennen, who hasn't texted Shen all day, which is apparently weird, and Kayn isn't answering Shen's texts, and Akali doesn't seem to be on campus, so as an excuse, Khada grabs two pairs of noise-cancelling headphones from the extra stack of them from his Orchestra group, and takes them over to Lux's classroom.

Kennen and Mohawk Kid have their hands on their ears and their heads on their desks, hoods up and looking different shades of miserable. He sets the headphones on Lux's desk and slips back out. He texts Shen on his way to the next classroom he'll need to be in, since going all the way to the other end of the campus to eat lunch in his office would leave him with no time to do so in the half hour he has.

_yeah kid looks miserable. mohawk kid and kennen both had their heads down on their desks with their hoods up so i couldn't get a good look but lulu and blue ears kid were trying to be really quiet. dropped off some headphones to block the noise of the storm, idk how well they'll work for yordles tho_

**_thanks_ **

_he looked. more down than usual with just a storm, whats up_

_**its not really** _

**_idk. ill call you tonight or smth_ **

It's unusual for Shen to skip proper grammar in texting, or to use textspeak, unless he's extremely upset.

Khada hears the bell ring to end lunch, and inhales his food before the first handful of kids can walk into the room.

~

He texts Zed while he's sitting in traffic on his way home, moving ten miles an hour start and stop.

_shen texted me earlier_

**_yeah?_ **

_asked me to check on kennen. we've had storms before but he's never felt the need to have someone actually check on the kid._

**_ah. yeah they're having a rough couple days i guess._ **

_????_

**_akali went missing._ **

Khada squints at the last message, making sure he read that right; he sets his phone down, not sure how to respond, and doesn't answer until he gets home. Varus's car is already in the driveway, a rare occurence. He sits there, his keys sitting in the cupholder, staring at his phone.

_wdym?_

**_she went out with kayn and talon saturday night, they all stayed over at talons place and she never went home. shes over 18 so theres nothing shen can legally do to look for her, shes not his daughter and he lost any legal rights way back in may. shes been an adult long enough that the cops aren't going to launch a full investigation until 7 days have passed, assuming akali doesnt do something to let the cops know shes not actually missing._ **

**_which she probably will, because when i asked kayn about it, he got really cagey, so i dont think shes in danger, i think she just took off._ **

_ok that sounds. really rife with some long-standing shit i don't know about._

**_you know shen doesnt like talking about home life unless hes looking for advice._ **

_a foster kid that isn't a kid, acting like she's gearing up to run off? doesn't sound like an out of the blue thing._

**_im pretty sure its not. but shens worried about her safety and her future and he may be closer to a dad to kennen, but akalis like his little sister man_ **

**_if i prod kayn the right way i can get more information and ill see what i can let you know but i gtg rn_ **

_bye good luck_

**_tnx_ **

Varus is watching him through the living room window, expressionless, probably only concerned that Khada's sat in the car for nearly twenty minutes.

Khada packs up his things, remembers his keys just in time to catch the locked door before it shuts, and heads inside to share the news.

Varus looks decently concerned at first, less so when he learns Kayn gets cagey when asked about the topic. There's nothing they can do here, though, with the limited information they have, and the fact that Akali is an adult, and, probably, left on her own.

Khada turns his ringer on for the first time since school started, though, hoping Shen has more information later in the night.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i fuckin told you i'd drop this and come back to it

Akali's been arguing with Shen for as long as she's known him. She doesn't do great in school at first; switching schools every six months will do that to you, when you're constantly either jumping backwards or forwards in the curriculum whenever you move houses. Shen was understanding, for the most part; said his best friend went through something similar when he moved in. 

She doesn't make many friends at first; why bother, when your guardians of the season pass you off as soon as they can? She'll find somewhere to sit at lunch, find an empty seat in whatever table she ends up at and listen to the gossip of the day, but then it's back to trying to figure out how the alphabet fits in with the numbers, and long division, and how fast the earth moves, and what country did what to who when, and she just. She tries to keep up, but her teachers always hand her tests back face down, and the best grade she can hope for is a D, because at least that passes, and after a month or so, a few kids will start to pick on her about her grades, and then she's gotta stick up for herself, right? But then _nobody_ wants to sit by her at lunch, so she ends up near the teacher, and that just makes it worse. So she goes home with bloody noses and write-ups and more than a few suspensions, and by the time she even makes it to Shen's house, every family she ends up in is already aware that she's a 'problem child', so why stop? 

She has to repeat a grade because of this, but it's not like she's got any friends that are leaving her behind.

~~~~

She doesn't really know what to make of Shen, when she meets him. He's calm, makes small talk in the car ride home for all of five minutes before he seems to grow bored of her two-word answers, and then she just looks out the window at the surprisingly nice houses and parks and-

He shows her her room, and it's painted a dark red with silver flowers and spirals and there's a wooden desk in the corner and one of those two-foot deep closets you see in every suburban house, and he tells her she can paint the room however she wants, that they'll go clothes shopping soon if she needs it, and the fridge is free game, and he sounds like he's rehearsed what he's saying. She finds out, two years later from Zed, that that's exactly what Shen's father said to him when he moved in.

She's Shen's first foster kid. She tries to shape up her act out of sheer pity, because she _knows_ that she isn't exactly an easy kid, and nice foster parents are few and far between, and she'd hate to be the reason another foster home turns shitty from bad past experiences. 

So she actually sits down at the kitchen table and studies, every day. Sits with her teacher at lunch trying to parse her way through algebra. Sits with Shen every weekend working her way through fourth-grade biology.

Her grades go up, little by little, and Shen, twenty-eight and still mostly unjaded, seems both genuinely happy and proud of her. She promises herself that she'll do her best to keep it that way. 

She doesn't. Fifth grade is a nightmare; it's the very beginning of the serious talks about what they want to do with their lives when they're adults, and she's never had the _time_ to think about that, or find what she's good at; she never did well enough in her normal classes to be able to put much effort into the extra ones, like band and art. She's great at fighting, but her teachers look at her kind-of disdainfully when she says that, so she doesn't say anything else. 

Fifth grade is a nightmare; it's the start of higher maths, and harder science classes, and they start unraveling history a bit, and she gets confused, because they said Ionia won the war against Noxus way back when and that was all, but now they're saying that Ionia only won because the land fought back against Noxus, and that the few fighters they had were super powerful or something, with the ability to summon tornadoes and lightning and she's so lost, even just a few months into the year. 

So her grades start dropping again.

Shen tries to sit with her as often as he can, says his friend went through something similar, and he'll start looking for a tutor for her who'll be able to better explain the things she's learning.

Once that's set up, her grades... Well, they stop going down, but they don't go up again, either. She's got hardly any free time, since after school she goes to the tutor every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on the other days, she's at an after-school thing until Shen gets off work and picks her up, and she spends all _that_ time struggling through the rest of the homework, because she can barely understand it without someone helping her remember to equalize equations and remember PEMDAS and tell her what to write on her flashcards for later, and then she gets home, eats dinner, and goes to bed, because she's tired. She's really tired. 

So she's really easy to piss off now, which is weird. She's doing a bit better in class with the tutor, she's eating and sleeping the right amount, she's doing her PE just fine, but it's like... Every little thing upsets her. There's no milk in the fridge one morning, which is her fault, because she didn't tell Shen that they were out yesterday morning, and she kicks a chair in frustration and eats her Lucky Charms dry. Now her foot hurts, so she plops into the car with a huff and Shen just kinda... looks at her. Another day, she drops part of her lunch on the floor trying to pull it out of the bag, and she manages to stop crying before it becomes noticeable, but her teacher hears the sniffles and says something and one of the kids farther down the table snickers, and she throws a dirty look and then the teacher Looks at her, and then she kinda just wants to die.

Shen's really late to picking her up from school one day, and she's sitting sullenly on the curb of the after-school parking lot, and she _almost_ says something, but then she sees how tired he looks, and she offers to cook dinner instead.

He laughs, says thank you, and they get take-out instead. He buys her bubble tea on the way to school the next morning.

The first time she gets into a fight, she immediately gets suspended. She spends the rest of the day in the principal's office, working through her homework (which is Finally easy enough for her to figure her way through on her own with only half the answers wrong, which is a solid improvement), goes to the after-school club thing that Shen sends her to for the two hours it usually takes him to get off work, and kicks a pebble through the parking lot on her way to the car when he does come.

The ride home is... Quiet. She can't tell if he's mad or not, and she's never pissed Shen off before, and she'd hate for the first time to be because some jerk in the hallway pushed her, hands and all, and sent her folder flying. There's footprints on half her note-pages, and both of her pencils are missing. 

They eat dinner quietly, and it seems like Shen's thinking about what to say, which is... probably a good sign?

He ends up saying it's stress. She's been really 'eer-ih-tu-ble' lately, and he'll talk to her tutor about decreasing how often she goes to see her. 

"That's it? No yelling, no locking me in my room or anything, no punishment?", she says.

He points at her with his fork, with a smile that's not quite happy. "You're doing dishes, sweeping, and watering the plants every day until you go back to school."

She spends the next five school-days, because she's suspended for a week, doing her homework, making a mess in the kitchen trying to figure out how to wash the dishes, cleaning that up, and then drawing characters on the TV. It's the first time she's been able to watch cartoons in almost a year, because she spent so much time trying to keep up in school here, and her last house didn't have a TV, and it's... Calming. 

So, when Shen sets her up with more free time, she does that 'tracing' thing more. 

Then she's doing it all the time. She doodles in the margins in her homework, draws on any scrap paper she has, she has to ask Shen for new notebooks when she fills up the paper in her other one.

When it becomes an almost monthly occurrence, he starts buying them in two's and three's.

By the time she hits sixth grade, she's not sure how many of them are stacked up on the edge of her desk.

By now, she's met most of Shen's friends, been to the kid-friendly parties, learned when to duck to avoid Kito's food when he throws it. She's learned when to pretend she isn't listening to Varus and Khada and Yasuo when their conversations get a little too creepy, and when to beg Shen to let her hang out at Zed's house for a bit, because Kayn's there, and Kayn's hilarious, and stupid, and really good at climbing things.

By now, she's learned that almost none of Kayn's absences from school are because he's sick or at the dentist like he tells the teachers, and she starts to notice another kid hanging out at Zed's house a lot too, looking for Kayn.

She stops noticing as much, because that's around when Kennen moves in, and she turns around in her seat to talk to this tiny yordle that's five years younger than her, bouncing in his seat and managing to look absolutely terrified. Five years means he's seven, or almost, but he says his words funny and doesn't like to be touched. When they get home, he touches _literally_ everything, runs in circles around the kitchen island, runs back and forth between the fridge and the couch in the living room; but as soon as the TV is on, he's sitting still and _chattering. To himself._

It takes Akali all of two hours to decide she has no idea what to do with Kennen. He talks weird, he sometimes doesn't talk at all, and most of the time when he does, it's to himself. He's six, almost seven, but he _acts_ like he's three or four. He's hyper and won't focus on anything for long unless it's a video game or the TV, and it has to be cartoons, all the time, or he'll actually start _crying_ because the show isn't what he wants. 

Shen seems to keep up with him, but the house fills up with a lot of books really really quickly, like Shen's going to find answers by reading medical textbooks or whatever about whatever's weird in Kennen's head. Shen gives her a _genuinely_ upset look when she says that, and she's careful not to say it in front of him again. 

But she can't do anything with him, and that's the most frustrating part. One of them has to be in the room with him All The Time, and sometimes that's not so bad, but he's _annoying_ , and he beats her at every video game they play, or he cries when he loses, and he's a bit of a jerk when he wins anyway, and if he's quiet, he's messing with something he shouldn't be, and he does that weird pacing thing between the fridge and the couch, and the windows are ALWAYS covered in paw prints and sometimes he'll ask for something when they go to the store and break out in screams and crying when Shen says no until he gets what he wants, and-

She's trying really hard not to hate the new addition to the household, because she knows what special needs looks like, walks past those kids at school a lot, sees the little bus take them home an hour before everyone else every day, but she's never interacted with them, she's never had to talk to one.

What's different about him? It's not a yordle thing, Tristana and Teemo seem perfectly normal, even if their PE is a bit different. Kayn seems not to like Kennen too much either, but he deals with him fine, like he's dealt with it before, and he calls it something with an A, antscism or something.

Akali can't go to hang out with Kayn and Talon very often anymore, because someone has to be home to keep an eye on Kennen, and Shen says it wouldn't be a good idea to have too many people in the house that Kennen doesn't know yet, so she can't invite them over for anything, and it's... frustrating, to say the least.

At the very least, they get to hang out with Penelope, Varus, and Kito a lot more, and Kito and Kennen get along great, at the same mental age of, like, four. Varus teaches her how to defend herself in fights a bit, and how to throw knives; Penelope teaches her how to cook, and how much salt is _too_ much.

Things come to a breaking point when there's a dance at school that she can't go to because of Kennen.

"It's not fair! I can't do _anything_ because of him, I haven't been able to hang out with anyone outside of school since he came here! He's loud, and dirty, and he touches everything and never washes his hands, and it's not cuz of the fur, cuz I know Teemo washes his hands all the time-"

"Teemo isn't autistic, and he's eleven-"

"I don't like him, I don't want to be here with him all the time-

"Akali, what would you have me do? I have to go to work tonight, and he's _seven_ , I can't leave him alone here, regardless of-"

Shen cuts himself off when he spots Kennen in the doorway of his bedroom, watching them silently. He scrubs at his face with both hands, and as Akali storms out of the room at the sight of the yordle, he sighs and picks up his cellphone.

Penelope answers the landline; Varus is working well into the night, but Valmar, across the room, pipes up that he can watch Kennen until Shen gets home, and he can pick Akali up at the end of the dance and make sure she gets into bed at a reasonable time.

When the call ends, he knocks on Akali's door, tells her to get into the shower and get ready for the dance, then spends the rest of the time before Valmar gets there trying to convince Kennen that it's not his fault Akali's upset. 

Valmar shows up, overnight bag loaded with coloring books and a couple kid board games he probably borrowed from Penelope, and Kennen brightens up immediately. 

Shen spends his free time during his shift at the hospital texting Penelope, back-and-forth about how he's allowed to ask for help from his friends, being reminded how much she and Varus needed help with Kito before they figured out what the heck they were doing, and how he's still really new to this parenting thing, and Akali's really new to having a stable environment, and all three of them are wildcards, and that he's not doing anything wrong.

Shen is eternally grateful to whatever deity exists that Varus even met Penelope in the first place, because he's not sure where half this group of morons would be without her.

When he gets home, Kennen's curled up asleep on Valmar's chest on the couch, and Akali's asleep in her room. He tucks a fifty dollar bill in Valmar's bag, right next to his phone, cleans up the toys on the floor, and goes to bed.

Valmar becomes a nearly permanent fixture in the house after that, and Akali seems a lot happier for it.

~~~~

By the time Akali makes it into her freshman year, she and Kennen have both attended their first funeral, and when they see Shen start to cry on the way home, silently, Akali makes him pull over into the first parking lot she sees, and it's the first time any of the three of them have hugged each other.

Shen asks Akali to keep an eye on Kennen one afternoon, about two months later. It's not nearly as necessary as it was; she doesn't have to be in the same room as him anymore so long as she checks on him every now and again, and he's been very subdued since Kito and Penelope died.

Shen comes home later that night with two cardboard boxes, and sets them down very gently on the floor in the living room.

It's not until Kennen starts crying that Akali realizes it's most of Kito's toys.

~~~~

Freshman year with Kayn is weird. He spends a lot of the time not even on campus, hanging out with Talon in a park somewhere. When she sees them on weekends, they've got paint in their hair and under their nails and they smell like gravel and dirt and aerosol, and she _really_ wants to know what the hell they're doing, so when she asks, they offer to take her with them. It's only a few hours before they're supposed to show up in the woods to her yard that she realizes that what they're doing is _so_ illegal, if they get caught, they're all so _screwed-_

It's the most fun she's had in years, actually. She doesn't know Talon super well, he's a homeless kid who's been avoiding the foster system his whole life, stealing things and running drugs for a couch to sleep on or money for food, and, apparently, for spray paints. He's pretty cool though, helps Akali figure out how to climb a chain link fence, and then a wooden one, and then a ten-foot concrete wall, and then Kayn shows her how to use the sprays, and she _knows_ she's really bad at it, but neither of them say anything, and it's a ton of fun. Nobody looks their way, no police sirens come screaming around corners, no company owners come tearing after them with makeshift weapons- Actually, the most nerve-wracking part of the whole thing is getting back into her house without alerting Shen.

It becomes a Thing™. They do it every weekend, when they won't be exhausted for the next school or workday, Talon sleeps over at Kayn's house a lot, but sometimes they don't want to walk that far so they all end up squeezing into Akali's tiny twin bed, and then the boys take off for Kayn's place or Talon will go to Yasuo's house or something at dawn, because Yasuo's like everyone's cool uncle, and it's great. It's fun.

Kayn gets a text towards the end of the first semester from Talon saying he got caught robbing a house, he's got no idea when he'll be back out.

The spray paint expeditions come to a screeching halt, and Kayn and Akali instead spend a lot of time pacing the back room of Yasuo's vape store, as the man listens to a police radio that neither of them dare question where it came from.

News comes from Talon himself, in the most unexpected way possible.

At the start of the new semester, after two months of complete silence, he shows up at their fucking school, new clothes, short hair, backpack and all. He's trailing behind Katarina, who's in their year but they've never talked to, almost like she's got him on a leash, and when they catch his eye, it's only for a split second, and he doesn't so much as blink at them.

Kayn texts Zed that he'll be late coming home today, Akali doesn't have to worry so long as she's home before five, and they book it to Yasuo's store.

They don't actually manage to talk to Talon until summer break, and it's simultaneously the most agonizing and boring five months Akali's ever been through.

She'd known Talon for a few months at most, but Kayn's known him for _years_ , and she's spent any and all free time just trying to keep Kayn from losing his fucking mind. 

She and Kayn start to drift apart toward the end of the year, and she's got no clue when that started or what caused it, but it's also how she ends up meeting Ahri and Kai'sa, and she feels guilty at how... fast she moves on.

Ahri's a singer, in the middle of her first contract, and she becomes a star almost overnight when the album releases. Kai'sa, a tentative friend of hers, ends up being her closest ally in warding off fan-classmates, and when a small mob forms, Akali steps up to help defend the very harried pair.

Kai'sa sings too, but it's really rare for people so young to make it so big so fast, and Akali's pretty sure it's only because Ahri looks a lot older than she is. It's been a while since Akali's been in an actual fight, but she used to horse around with Kayn and a few of his 'siblings' a lot, so she's probably not as rusty as she thinks. 

It comes close, but no actual fight breaks out, and she and Kai'sa manage to get Ahri away from the hoard begging for autographs and into the room she's supposed to be in, where a teacher already stands guard at the door. 

They wave goodbye to Ahri, who's somehow managed to keep her composure as far as Akali can tell, and she and Kai'sa head off down the hall.

Kai'sa has been Ahri's friend only since the beginning of the year, a new transfer from somewhere in Shurima, but they bonded over music, and Kai'sa doesn't seem overly social, so she'd probably defend Ahri to the death. Akali, finding herself rather... lacking in friends, kind of wants to jump into the wagon.

~~~~

So she does. Over the rest of the year, while she's keeping an ear on Talon and a distant eye on Kayn, she's talking to Ahri and Kai'sa about their music, about what they want to do.

She starts listening to music more, while she draws, while she does her homework, her chores. She watches videos on youtube analyzing songs and music videos, what works and what doesn't, starts checking out books from both the school and public libraries on the topics. 

She tries to convince Shen to let her get singing lessons or something, but it's a firm no-go, and she's not sure why.

It's actually the root cause of a lot of their problems- What she wants to do with her life. She's good at art, and by the time summer rolls around, she's really into music, has a decent understanding from both the internet and from Kai'sa and Ahri about what's good and what's not, what the industry is like, she's got gateways sitting _right there-_

But Shen wants her to go into something actually 'useful', by which he means medicine, or business, or law. The problem is, she's barely passing most of her classes, doesn't show Shen her grades often anymore- Fuck, her best class is Geometry, with a low B. She wouldn't get accepted into a university, and she sure as hell wouldn't keep her grades high enough for long enough to get a degree, especially not in those fields.

What she's good at is art. She's gotten better at tagging, going out on her own and buying paints with her allowance. She sells some of her drawings, to people at school and to people online, for ingame currency, but the money from classmates pays for supplies. When she's old enough to open a bank account, she'll start doing commissions online, make an actual business out of it. 

She tries to tell Shen about this, but for some reason, this is what he puts his foot down on. 

They actually argue about it a lot, and she's felt increasingly bad about it when she spots Kennen in the corners of the room, or down the hallway. She stops bringing it up with Shen.

School lets out for the summer, and she goes out for coffee or tea or lunch with Ahri and Kai'sa a lot. They can all pay for their own things, and she gripes about it just as often as Ahri and Kai'sa gripe about the industry, or the fans. Kai'sa isn't nearly as big as Ahri is, but she's got a decent following of her own, and it had started to crop up in school before the break, so Akali will have to watch out for both of them soon. 

~~~~

Maybe two weeks into the summer, at midnight on the fucking dot, a rock hits her window with a clink. 

She doesn't hear it, with her music playing so loud in her headphones, but she spots the little grey movement out of the corner of her eye the second time, and when she looks through the glass, she almost jumps, because she doesn't recognize Talon with clean clothes and short hair. It's not as short as it was; finally past his ears, but there's a familiar bag slung over his shoulder, and she can see Kayn back in the treeline of the yard. 

She's never packed her paint bag faster, or jumped fifteen feet more happily.

~~~~

It turns out, Talon's been adopted. The weird thing is, it's by the family he tried to rob. 

The Du Couteau family is fucking terrifying, something something mafia, but their combatants specialize in bladed weapons, not guns, and it doesn't take any longer than hearing that sentence from Talon to put two and two together. Talon's always been scary good with knives, and the only reason he got caught is because the older daughter of the family does assassinations for a living, been trained for it since she could crawl, and knew exactly what an intruder would look like. 

The whole thing screams _freaky_ to her, but Talon seems... Happy with whatever arrangement is going on. No cops were going to be called if he joined the family, because he apparently got into a fight with Kat, the girl who caught him, the girl he'd been following around since he showed up at their school, and actually managed to hold his own in the fight; so well, in fact, that the only injuries either of them walked away with were minor cuts and bruises. 

He's paid really fucking well for whatever jobs he does, and she knows from some quietly-told stories from Kayn that Talon had killed before, but it's... Different. All of the stories had been self-defense, not murder, and... It's different. She knows it's different. Talon even _holds_ himself differently. 

They don't talk about the sudden changes in his life, or the fact that he rematerialized after six months of radio silence.

They free run the low buildings, find new spots to tag, and dog-pile on Akali's bed, respirators and windbreakers piled in the corner, on a stained piece of cardboard.

~~~~

Sophomore year is where Talon's lack of education starts to show, since he somehow managed to skate through freshman year on the basics he'd picked up. His new family provides all the tutoring he needs, but apparently there's punishments involved if he doesn't keep his grades up. He'd been in tutoring the entire time, catching him up, but it's not even been a year for him to catch up to everyone else who's had ten years to learn the building blocks of this shit, and a lot of their weeknights are spent huddled together, teaching and explaining to the best of their ability. 

Akali still gets lunch with Ahri and Kai'sa, and when she explains the bare minimum of what's going on in her other social triangle, they understand her sudden lack of balance.

Kai'sa's started talking about starting a band, or a music group, whatever term is more applicable, though it doesn't seem to be going great. Ahri is her only other contact right now that she trusts enough to try to start a band with, and Akali can't do anything without Shen's permission yet. She's sixteen, but two years is a really long time to just _wait_.

~~~~

"You know, we're supposed to get scouted into existing groups. That's how this normally works, you go to meet-ups and talk to people and make connections that way," Ahri says, during one of their lunches.

"Yeah, but I don't want to do that. I don't want to get scouted onto a team of people I don't know," is Kai'sa's response.

"So how do we just start our own group? We don't exactly have funding to film, post-production, directors, the legal shit-" Akali cuts herself off, taking a bite of her japchae.

"... I might have a friend who can help with that, but like... Do you guys know anybody with talents in that kind of stuff? Filming, editing, sound design?" Ahri says, hesitantly.

"My brother does a bit of video editing, he really wanted to get into this youtuber scene a few months ago and got his hands on some free software, but I don't know if Kennen can handle sound."

Akali's lying. Kennen's watched countless videos on editing, she's seen some of the videos he puts out if he puts the time into it. It's, like... Almost too convenient. The problem is, she doesn't know if she wants Kennen to get involved in this stuff. One part of it is concern that, if or when their stuff blows up, he won't be able to handle it. Akali's spent the past four years handling Ahri and Kai'sa getting swamped in the halls, has spent countless _hours_ with Jhin and Yasuo and Ekko, learning about music theory and good beats and whatnot, how to get everything to sound just right. She's spent days and weeks and months designing outfits, with Ahri's input on color combos and materials that work well for dancing; she and Kai'sa have slept at Ahri's house many many times now, figuring out what types of dances tend to go with which styles of beats, which style of beats tend to go with which style of music, which style of music works for them. Another part is a lot more selfish, in that... She doesn't want him involved. This is _her_ thing, and she doesn't want to share it more than she already is. But, on the other hand, if she does, it'll give him something to put on a resume, or a direction to go in for college, so he's not in the same spot she's in, telling Shen one thing when he asks her about career choices, and doing something else entirely behind his back.

Akali can rap, but she can't hold a note if she tries to sing. Ahri can't rap to a beat, but she sings beautifully, has been singing her entire life. Kai'sa can do a bit of both, but she's much better at singing, and will always prefer to do that. They're a good balance on paper, but in practice, they just haven't been able to get it to work, and the fact that Akali can't figure out how to move seamlessly between a rap beat and a dance beat doesn't help. 

Yasuo has been a great help at practicing that, just on the music front, and Kayn's helped her practice the choreography bits that they've come up with, and Talon's phone has a really nice camera to film it.

Ahri has a small studio in her house, brightly lit with mirrors along two walls and smooth wood paneling along the others so they can clearly see themselves in the mirrors; they practice together there as often as they can, between homework and school events and clubs and sports. Yasuo shows up at least once a week to watch them and give whatever tips he can, from what he's seen in his own _extremely varied_ work experience; Jhin listens to their bits of music and helps them brainstorm, and _blessedly_ doesn't breathe a word of it all to Shen.

~~~~

They've almost got it. A debut song, at least; something big, flashy, screaming 'pay attention to us, we'll be the next big thing'. Ahri's contact Evelynn, a few years older than them and three years into a music degree, has some amazing insight, information, ideas that none of them thought of. She helps them blend the singing parts into rap and vice versa, helps them blend it all together. She helps with the choreography, gives them ideas for outfits and stark color combos, gives them scene ideas for a music video.

Evelynn is the one who pulls in a friend from college who's majoring in video production to get the video done; if it goes well, then he gets payed in equal part to everyone else involved, and if it all doesn't blow up the music charts, then he's at least got something awesome to put in a portfolio. 

Evelynn goes with the girls to Yasuo's vape store before it opens one Saturday, perches herself on a glass counter to watch them with her condescending smile (it's just RBF, Akali, it's fine) as they beg him to help them with the music editing and blending, promising him the same offer they gave Evelynn's video friend.

The pop group idea is going _great_ , so why does Akali feel an impending sense of doom?

~~~~

"Music isn't a safe career, Akali."

"You can't do this and expect it to end well, it'll crush you when it doesn't go as planned."

"What about when you don't have a contract, don't have music ready to be released? How are you going to keep yourself afloat during the dry spells, what about when it all dries up and there _aren't_ any more contracts, when your popularity dies out?"

Akali is livid.

Zed, Kayn, Varus, even _Sona_ all tried to warn her about Khada. 'He likes to stir up trouble' were Varus' exact words. 'He does everything with a purpose, and you won't see it, and you'll be mad at him for years when he does it, even if it leads to something absolutely fucking amazing, but if he likes you, he'll find a way to point you in the direction he wants you' were Zed's.

Of course he told Shen, he's the only one who would have. Yasuo was never willing to gamble on talking to Shen about it, was worried he'd find a way to put a stop to it all. Zed said, 'Kid, you're eighteen. Shen can't stop you, and there's too many people involved for him to screw over the entire thing, even if I did tell him. You're the only one he can get in the way of, and since you're an adult, it's really limited how he can do even that.'

Varus doesn't talk to most of that group, rarely even has the time to, and since Penelope and Kito died, he's been more antisocial than he was before.

Kayn's perfectly good at keeping secrets, unspoken truces and rules are always followed with him, and he and Talon both know how much this means to Akali.

Khada Jhin is the only person she was ever warned about, and she knows nobody else did it.

She was slipping, she knows it. Maybe that's why he did it, to piss her off and get her to focus on the pop group even more than she already had been, but there's a wave of tests she had to study for, and help Talon study for, and she hadn't gone out to paint with Kayn and Talon in weeks, and-  
Things are coming to a breaking point, at home. Everywhere else is fine, she's working more on the music and art than ever before out of sheer frustration, an outlet for her anger, and if that isn't what Khada wanted, then she doesn't know what was.  
Akali argues with Shen almost nightly. Most of them are short, because she'll get pissed off and walk away, hide in her room with her music, dancing and practicing and _working_ , but there are some, and the number is slowly increasing, where the yelling will only stop because they remember Kennen's in the house, or because he walks in the front door, or because Shen's phone or pager goes off, or because Akali has to leave _now_ for school, or for practice, or for a brainstorming session that's been planned days in advance.  
Some nights, Shen and Akali yell until their voices are hoarse, and Kennen stays in his room for the entire evening; some nights, he doesn't even come down to dinner.

~~~~

The breaking point comes. They're a month away from releasing; they managed to get a small music company to sponsor them, they've got everything filmed and it's all down to editing, and even that's almost done.

All it is is a waiting game, and Akali's never been more high-strung. The arguments are getting even worse, even though she's _told_ Shen that everything's almost done, everything is final, and even if it goes poorly, she'll have something for a portfolio.

There's one night that they're arguing over their fried fish and stir-fry, and Kennen's got tears in his eyes when he finally stops covering his ears and runs away to his room. That's the breaking point. All of her anger bleeds out of her as she watches brown fur and a purple shirt scrambling up the carpet on the stairs.

"I refuse to give this up. You can't take it away from me, it's already done. All you're doing is making everyone in this house unnecessarily miserable, Shen. I'm done arguing. I'm done trying to convince you that this is what I want to do with my life. It's already done, and there's nothing either of us can do to stop it. If it goes great, then it changes my life and I do something I've been building up to for years now. If it goes badly, nothing changes, and I try again. At least now, I've got experience and a foot in the door."

With that, she stands up, follows Kennen up the stairs, ignore's whatever Shen says to that, ignores his tired sigh of frustration, and knocks on Kennen's door.

She doesn't wait for him to open it, he's only been in there for ten seconds. She finds him on his bed, the sweater from Kayn pulled over his favorite purple shirt and the sleeves bunched up where his claws are digging into the fabric.

She closes the door behind her, and sits next to him, the mattress dipping and forcing Kennen to lean into her. He doesn't pull away, so she wraps her arms around him and pulls him into her side. 

They sit there, in the silence, as Akali rocks him side to side, the cursor on his discord app blinking on a small window in the corner of his screen, a game she doesn't recognize open in the window under that. The first thing she's buying, when she gets the money from this, because she _knows_ it'll blow up, she can _feel_ it, is a second monitor for her brother.

They sit there for maybe half an hour before she figures out what she wants to say to Kennen.

"Nothing bad will come out of this. Not anymore. I'm done arguing with him, there's nothing I can convince him of anyway. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to see that."

"Shen's stubborn. Like you."

Akali snorts at that. "I'd say I learned it from him, but I think it came from my mom. But... I promise, this'll go great. At worst, I have something awesome to use to get me into the industry, and I really do love the music we've got."

"And at best?", Kennen asks, after a pause.

"It blows up the charts, and we all become stars. Not all of that'll be good, I think, but it's what we want to happen," she answers.

"What's the good and the bad?"

"Good is, we get really popular for making something great by doing something we all love and are really excited to be _able_ to do. We make a bunch of money, for ourselves and for the Summoners company that's thinking about picking us up long-term, we get contracts and funding to make more music and videos. Bad, I guess, is that there'll be a lot of travel and a lot of logistics that none of us really know about. Ahri was underage when she got big, so other people had to handle that for her, but we'll figure it out as we go along."

"I don't want you to go away," Kennen says, and his voice breaks on 'want'.

She sighs, and tightens her arms around him "Oh, Kennen."

"I'll always come back."

~~~~

It's later that Saturday night that she's packing her bags, grabbing her homework and all the other stuff she's supposed to have, packing her paints and clothes and art pinned up to the walls and stacking her notebooks into a box. Katarina is parking the car four houses down as Talon sweeps into her room, grabbing a couple of the bags and climbing out, down the trellis for the vegetable garden that's been outside the kitchen window for years.

She's said goodnight to Kennen, stood in tense silence in the bathroom with Shen as they brushed their teeth before bed, and... 

Ahri's been offering her the spare bedroom for months, and she's finally... going.

It's a bit fucked, she knows, to just... leave them. Shen's more of an older brother than a dad for her, but she knows he'll be upset about this. Kennen will be devastated, especially after their conversation tonight.

She's not great at goodbye's, though, and Shen would do everything in his power to get her to stay, and Kennen would too, and she... If she doesn't go now, she'll go tomorrow, or the day after,and the longer she waits, the worse it'll be for all three of them.

The more Shen will push, and the more they'll argue. She said she was done arguing, but that's, like. The _only_ kind of conversation she's had with Shen for weeks now, and they've been doing it so much lately that it's probably just a habit now, to push against each other.

She has to leave tonight, or it'll just get worse.

Talon doesn't say a word as they climb in the car, as Kat drives away from the only stable life Akali's ever known, as they pick Kayn up somewhere along the way, and... 

She'll always come back.

**Author's Note:**

> changing the texting format, it was pissing me off whenever i reread the previous chapters. should be a little easier to tell who is sending what. i'll go back in the other chapters and edit it in later.  
> look i was legally obligated to make chapter 4 about jhin. also, starting an actual Plot WOO


End file.
